eliciting mental state terms

[Leo Ferres]

Dear colleagues;

I've been thinking about a way to elicit mental state terms from children
aged 2 to 5 years, but haven't come up with a satisfactory methodology yet.
My best idea (!) was to use something like the frog story (or something
similar) and stop at particular points to ask a question of the style
(*roughly*]: 'why is the boy carrying a net?' and hope children would answer
something along the lines of 'because he wants to catch X', for example.
Apart from the fact that I'm not terribly happy with this methodology,
there's the added problem of reference to self, instead of others. I could
ask the child to identify himself with the character, but that's the last
thing I'd like to do. So, I'm turning to you to see if anyone has a better
idea of how to do this. Thank you very much.

My best regards to all the community,

Leo

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Leo Ferres,
Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies &
School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies,
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Email: lferres at ccs.carleton.ca