Cultural Influences on Mother-Child Conversations in Monolingual European American, Monolingual Hispanic American and Bilingual Hispanic American Mothers

Adult-child interactions vary between cultures. For example, Hispanic parents are characterized by a more adult-centered style of interaction with children, while European American parents are more child-centered. Little is known about the influences cultural differences may have on the ways that Spanish-English bilingual parents speak to their children in each language. To address this question, 17 monolingual Spanish-speaking Hispanic American mothers, 22 monolingual English-speaking European American mothers, and 33 Spanish-English bilingual mothers were videorecorded in toy-play interactions with their children. The bilingual mothers and children were recorded in two sessions, one in which they were instructed to speak English and one in which they were instructed to speak Spanish. Using CHILDES programs, these interactions were transcribed and coded for properties of parent-child conversation known to be related to child language outcomes and hypothesized to reflect parent-centered and child-centered styles of interaction. The parent-child conversations of the two monolingual groups were compared in order to obtain baseline cultural differences in interaction style. The parentchild conversations of the bilingual mothers when speaking Spanish and when speaking English were compared in terms of the properties that showed differences between the monolingual groups. The conversations of the monolingual Hispanic American mothers were characterized by fewer maternal word types, and proportionately fewer maternal questions, and fewer child utterances than the conversations of the monolingual European American mothers. These differences were reflected in the comparisons of the bilingual mothers’ Spanish and English interactions with the exception of number of word types. The results are consistent with the hypotheses that (1) Spanish-speaking Hispanic American mothers use a more adult-centered style of interaction with their children compared to European American mothers, who use a more child-centered style of interacting with children and that (2) Hispanic American bilingual mothers reflect aspects of these cultural differences when speaking each language with their children.