Focus on one or more? Cultural differences in how parents talk about social events to preschool children

• In Event: Cultural perspectives on relational learning: Variation in parental input and children’s performance

Abstract

Previous studies investigating cultural differences in attention and perception have shown that individuals from Western countries (e.g., the U.S.) perceive more analytically (e.g., focusing on one element of the scene) whereas individuals from East Asian countries (e.g., Japan) perceive more holistically (e.g., attending to the relationship between focal objects and the context) (e.g., Nisbett & Miyamoto, 2005). These differences have been shown in children as young as three years old (Kuwabara & Smith, 2016). How could these differences in basic cognitive functions be so strong so early in development? In this study, we investigated one of the potential routes - language, especially how parents discussed with their children about social events. Based on previous research on attentional differences, we hypothesized that the U.S. parents would discuss one character more than the other character (focusing on one) and do so more often than Japanese parents who may focus more on both characters when discussing social events.
We created the animal puppet show containing positive events (e.g., giving a gift) and negative events (e.g. knocking over the block tower) (see Figure 1). All of these shows contained at least two puppets, an actor and a recipient of the event. We asked parents to talk to their three- and four-years old children about these events as they normally would. 26 dyads from the U.S. were tested in the U.S. and 26 dyads from Japan were tested in Japan. From the transcription of what parents said, we coded which character – the actor or the recipient of the scene – was explicitly mentioned (e.g., a lion gave a present to frog) and was described based on verbs and adjectives of each utterance to account for language differences (e.g., he was building a block tower - frog).
To account for variability in the amount of discussion parents had with their child, the mean ratio of the actor talk and the recipient talk was calculated for positive scenes and negative scenes for each participant.
The mean ratio of the actor talk was entered into 2 scene types (positive vs. negative) x 2 country (the U.S. vs. Japan) rANOVA, which yield the significant interaction between scene types and country, F(1,50)=8.84, p<.01. Interestingly, there were no cultural differences in positive events - both the U.S. and Japanese parents discussed actors more than recipients F(1,50)=1.51, p=.23. For negative events, we found that the U.S. parents discussed one character (especially actors) more than the other character and did so more often than Japanese parents F(1,50)=8.45, p<.01. The results of this study contribute to a potential transmission vector of cross-cultural differences in attention and perception.

Authors

• Megumi Kuwabara, California State University, Dominguez Hills
  Presenting Author

• Linda B. Smith, Indiana University - Bloomington
  Non-Presenting Author