Parents’ Heritage Language Use, Socioeconomic Status, and Children’s Ethnic Identity in Chinese Immigrant Families

• In Event: Parent Racial-Ethnic Socialization among Asian American Families

Abstract

Introduction
Heritage language - a non-majority language spoken in or inherited from the family context (Montrul, 2016) - is a central component of ethnic identity (Oh & Fuligni, 2010). Immigrant parents may use their family’s heritage language as a form of cultural maintenance to promote their children’s ethnic identity (Kim & Chao, 2009). However, existing research has relied primarily on parent reports of heritage language use aggregated across multiple contexts. The present study advances this research by identifying patterns of immigrant parents’ heritage language use during conversations with their elementary-aged children, and testing associations between heritage language use and children’s self-reported ethnic identity centrality and positive ethnic regard. We hypothesize that parents’ heritage language use will be positively associated with children’s ethnic centrality and regard.

Method
The present sample included first-generation Chinese American immigrant parents (N = 109) and their children (7-11 years old, M = 9.16 years, 48.5% female). As part of a larger laboratory-based study, parents and children participated in a 3-minute dyadic emotion discussion, during which they were encouraged to speak in their preferred language(s). Discussions were video recorded, transcribed, and coded to calculate parents’ proportion of Chinese and English use per conversation. In individual interviews, children reported on the centrality and positive ethnic regard toward their Chinese ethnic identity using an adapted version of the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM; Phinney, 1992).

Results
Multiple regressions tested associations between parents’ proportion of Chinese use and children’s ethnic centrality and regard. As socioeconomic status (SES) has also been identified as a factor in children’s ethnic identity development (Phinney et al., 2001; Reese et al., 1998), regressions also tested interactions between family SES and parents’ proportion of Chinese use in predicting children’s ethnic identity. Multiple regressions controlling for SES indicated that parents’ proportion of Chinese use was significantly associated with children’s ethnic regard (b = 1.368, p = .039), but not their ethnic centrality. SES moderated the relationship between parents’ proportion of Chinese use and children’s ethnic centrality (b = -1.168, p = .013; see Figure 1), but not ethnic regard. Simple slopes analyses indicated that parents’ proportion of Chinese use was associated with children’s ethnic centrality among parents with low SES (b = 1.95, p = .011), but not medium or high SES.

Discussion
The present study demonstrates how patterns of heritage language use can vary even among parents from the same ethnic group and immigrant generation. Moreover, these variations in heritage language use can be observed in dyadic conversations with their children and are associated with aspects of children’s ethnic identity. Our results also indicate that the effects of parents’ heritage language use on children’s ethnic identity may vary across high- and low-SES families, and as such, underscore the importance of examining variations in SES within ethnic groups. Taken together, results highlight observed dyadic conversations as a promising mechanism for identifying everyday patterns of heritage language use, but also point to a need to identify specific mechanisms through which heritage language use and SES may impact different aspects of children’s ethnic identity.

Authors

• Cindy J Huang, Columbia University
  Presenting Author

• Sylvia H.M. Wong, Columbia University

• Aya Williams, University of California - Berkeley

• Anna E. Lau

• Stephen H Chen, Wellesley College