This Dataverse collects together study materials relating to investigations into the way that parents describe mental states to their children, as observed in a wordless picturebook sharing task. The open access picture book 'What a Scary Storm!' (Styles, 2020) was designed to elicit descriptions of emotions including fear, surprise, and happiness, as well as mental states related to decision making, action planning, and violation of expectation. These story elements are related to the 'Talk Together Programme of tips to enhance parent-child interactions' (Styles, 2021), which was rolled out as in a randomised controlled trial in the Talk Together study. Parent-child conversations were recorded using video conferencing tools (Woon et al., 2021), and transcribed multilingually using the in-house BELA transcription conventions.


Mental State Events in the Talk Together Study
• T1 Event Coding dataset (preliminary)
All transcripts containing English or a mix of English and Mandarin in T1 of the Talk Together study were manually coded to identify mental state events. As a single utterance can contain multiple mental state events (e.g., *See*, the monkey *looks* *scared*"), each event is given a unique ID, and coded for the type of mental state, in a coding scheme adapted from Slaughter (2007), where events are classified as "Cognition", "Perception/Attention"; or "Affect", differentiated by "simple" descriptions of mental states or "clarification" of a mental state. For further details of the coding scheme see the Preregistrations below (Tay et al., 2022; Wee et al., 2022).

Preliminary investigations of emotion talk and cognitive talk in parental speech to children (T1):
• Parental descriptions of emotions: Tay et al., 2022 (prereg | prelim report )
• Parental descriptions of mental states: Choo et al., 2022 (prereg | prelim report )