Poster #140 - Mothers’ Usage of Wh-Questions During Mother-Child Interactions in South Korean Multicultural Families

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Children’s language ability is shaped by parents’ input during parent-child interactions (Rowe, 2012). In early childhood, the quality of parent input is critical, with the wh-questions being particularly beneficial (Valian & Casey, 2003). The more complex questions, or open-ended wh-questions that challenge children to provide complex responses, can develop children’s language skills, encouraging them to form their own wh-questions (Rowe, Leech, & Cabrera, 2017). While parents’ use of wh­-questions and its effect on children’s language development have been often examined, there is little to no research on its implications in families from diverse backgrounds. Thus, the study examined parent-child interactions of multicultural families in South Korea to investigate the type and frequency of mothers’ questions (wh-questions and other), with a further aim of examining their relations to children’s language skills.

Forty multicultural mothers and their children (M = 45 months, Range = 23 – 71 months) were recruited for the study. A multicultural family is defined as a family that consists of one parent – oftentimes the mother – who is an immigrant from a non-Korean nation (Ministry of Education and Human Resource, 2008). Being Korean language learners themselves like their children, these mothers are often thought to lack the capacity to provide quality language input (e.g., asking complex questions), suggesting their inefficacy to support their children’s language development. In the study, the mother-child dyads were videotaped for a 15-minute playtime in their homes, where they were asked to play with a set of toys and read a book in Korean. These interactions were then transcribed, and mothers’ questions were coded for their types (Table 1).

As in past studies, mothers’ total numbers of utterances during the interactions varied widely (M = 201.75, Range = 32 - 299). Similarly, there was a substantial variation in the total numbers of questions the mothers asked their children (M = 69.85, Range = 4 - 178). On average, mothers asked a similar number of open-ended questions (M = 33.03, SD = 20.00) and close-ended questions (M = 32.58, SD = 22.92; Table 2). Among open-ended questions, mothers, on average, were most likely to ask what-questions (M = 23.18, SD = 15.04). Interestingly, given the uniqueness of the Korean language, a category of one-word questions (“응 /Eung/?”) with specific functions (Table 2) was used to elicit similar responses from children to those of open-ended questions without elaboration, perhaps suggesting the possibility of a new type of question that is neither closed- nor open-ended.

This study is one of the first to examine mothers’ usage of wh- questions in South Korea’s multicultural families. Despite the general assumptions that these mothers are unable to provide high-quality input, our data showed these mothers’ frequent usage of wh-questions, indicating that they do, to a certain degree, play their role as communicative partners for their children. Adding to the current findings, we will further examine children’s responses to the mothers’ wh-questions and whether mothers’ wh-questions relate to children’s participation in these parent-child interactions.

Authors

• Hye Jeong Jeong, Harvard Graduate School of Education
  Presenting Author

• So Yeon Shin, Harvard Graduate School of Education
  Non-Presenting Author

• Hyewon Park, University of Ulsan
  Non-Presenting Author

• Meredith Rowe, Harvard University
  Non-Presenting Author