Whose Reality Matters? Children’s Ontologies, Theories of Mind, and Reading

There is a relationship between children's ability to formulate theories of mind (i.e., metacognitive hypotheses) about persons or characters in a text and their comprehension of the text. Nevertheless, few studies examine how young children engage their ontological background knowledge to formulate their theories-of-mind. Set in a public library of a new Latinx diasporic community of the U.S. southeast, this case study examines how, within the context of family literacy program, a group of emergent bilingual children (ages 4–8) employ their ontologies to interpret the mental states of persons in a target-text. Data sources include artifacts, audio-visual recordings, and a group exit interview. Qualitative content analysis methods were employed. The results recognize children's ontologies as relevant sources of background knowledge on which to scaffold their reading comprehension.