Abstract
Cross-cultural differences in book sharing practices of American and Thai mother-preschooler dyads were examined. Twenty-one Thai monolingual and 21 American-English monolingual mothers and their four-year-olds completed a book sharing task. Results revealed narrative style differences between the American and Thai groups: American mothers adopted a high-elaborative story-builder style and used affirmations, descriptions, extensions, and recasting more than Thai mothers. Thai mothers adopted a low-elaborative story-teller style and used more attention directives and expansions than American mothers. American children produced longer narratives than their Thai peers, whereas Thai children repeated their mothers' utterances more than their American counterparts. Maternal and child narrative styles were associated. These results suggest that maternal scaffolding styles differ across cultures and influence children's developing narrative skills.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 834-857 |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Journal | Journal of Child Language |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 2021 |
Funding
Funding: Research reported in this publication was supported in part by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute Of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01HD059858 to Viorica Marian. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. The authors would like to thank the mothers and children who participated in this study, as well as the research assistants who have worked on transcribing and coding the video data including Julia Borland, Laura Montenegro, and Grace Pickens. They would also like to thank the members of the Northwestern University Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group and Drs. Erika Hoff and Steve Zecker for helpful comments and input on this work. Research reported in this publication was supported in part by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute Of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01HD059858 to Viorica Marian. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
Keywords
- book sharing
- cross-cultural
- scaffolding
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
- General Psychology
- Developmental and Educational Psychology
- Language and Linguistics
- Linguistics and Language