Cheng, M.; Setoh, P.; Bornstein, M.H.; Esposito, G. She Thinks in English, But She Wants in Mandarin: Differences in Singaporean Bilingual English–Mandarin Maternal Mental-State-Talk. Behavioral Sciences 2020, 10, 106, doi:10.3390/bs10070106.
Cheng, M.; Setoh, P.; Bornstein, M.H.; Esposito, G. She Thinks in English, But She Wants in Mandarin: Differences in Singaporean Bilingual English–Mandarin Maternal Mental-State-Talk. Behavioral Sciences 2020, 10, 106, doi:10.3390/bs10070106.
Cheng, M.; Setoh, P.; Bornstein, M.H.; Esposito, G. She Thinks in English, But She Wants in Mandarin: Differences in Singaporean Bilingual English–Mandarin Maternal Mental-State-Talk. Behavioral Sciences 2020, 10, 106, doi:10.3390/bs10070106.
Cheng, M.; Setoh, P.; Bornstein, M.H.; Esposito, G. She Thinks in English, But She Wants in Mandarin: Differences in Singaporean Bilingual English–Mandarin Maternal Mental-State-Talk. Behavioral Sciences 2020, 10, 106, doi:10.3390/bs10070106.
Abstract
Chinese-speaking parents are argued to use less cognitive mental-state-talk than their English-speaking counterparts due to their goals in socializing their children to follow an interdependence script. To extend this research, we investigated bilingual Mandarin-English Singaporean mothers who associate different functions for each language as prescribed by their government: English for school and Mandarin for in-group contexts. English and Mandarin maternal mental-state-talk from bilingual Mandarin-English mothers with their toddlers was examined. Mothers produced more cognitive terms in English than in Mandarin and more desire terms in Mandarin than in English. We show that mental-state-talk differs between bilingual parents’ languages, suggesting that mothers adjust their mental-state-talk to reflect each language’s function.
Keywords
bilingualism; mental-state-talk; socialization
Subject
Social Sciences, Psychology
Copyright:
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