Theory of mind and text comprehension across the lifespan: A meta-analysis.

Researchers argue that theory of mind (ToM) abilities are needed for text (listening or reading) comprehension. Although many studies have supported this claim, findings are mixed and researchers have disagreed on how fundamental this relation is-for example, whether ToM and text comprehension are related merely because of shared variance with verbal and executive function skills. To address these issues more definitively, we conducted a meta-analysis examining ToM and text comprehension, which included 47 independent samples with 5,123 participants ranging in age from 3 to 70 years of age ( = 10.