About this session

Thursday, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

Multilingual parent-child conversations in the family context: Implications for children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development

More than one in five individuals in the United States over the age of five hear and speak languages other than English at home. The four papers in this symposium examine these processes at the microsystem level: specifically, by examining bilingual conversations between parents and children.

Our symposium integrates diverse observational approaches to analyzing language in dyadic, multilingual parent-child interactions (sequential analyses, conversation analysis, moment-to-moment analysis of code-switching). The data represent a range of languages spoken by parents and children (Chinese-English, Thai-English, Spanish-English) across developmental periods (preschool through late elementary school) in various multilingual contexts (immigrants, bilinguals living in their countries of origin).

Paper 1 examined contingent relations between maternal and child contributions to a shared book reading task among low-income, preschool-age dual language learners of Mexican and Chinese heritage. Paper 2 investigated whether Thai-English bilingual mothers and their preschool children discussed and displayed emotions differently across their two languages during a prompted reminiscing task. Paper 3 used a mixed methods approach to examine Chinese immigrant parents and children’s conversational practices and emotion experiences during a conflict discussion task. Finally, Paper 4 identified latent profiles of Chinese immigrant parents’ expressions of love and care during discussions with their children and examined the predictive role of code-switching.

Together, the presentations illustrate the interconnectedness between language, culture, and emotion in naturalistic conversations. In particular, each paper's approach to multilingual conversations highlights variations within cultural groups, and by doing so, counters biases of cultural homogeneity in developmental psychological science.

Paper #1
Title	Maternal-Child Contributions in Shared Book Reading Among Mexican and Chinese Heritage Preschool-Age Dual Language Learners
Presenting author	Emily Mak, U.C. Davis, United States

Paper #2
Title	Bilingual Mothers and Children Discuss and Display Emotions Differently in their First and Second languages
Presenting author	Jessica Yung-Chieh Chuang, Northwestern University, United States

Paper #3
Title	Emotion Experiences, Emotion Perceptions, and Evaluations in Bilingual Chinese Immigrant Parent-Child Dyads' Conflict Discussions
Presenting author	Cindy J. Huang, M.Ed., M.A., Teachers College, Columbia University, United States

Paper #4
Title	Bilingual Language Switching Activates Multiple Cultural Scripts of Emotion In Chinese-American Parent-Child Affirmation Discussion
Presenting author	Aya Williams, Ph.D., Santa Clara University, United States

View all paper details

Session chairs
Aya Williams, Ph.D., Santa Clara University, United States; Dr. Stephen H. Chen, Ph.D., , United States

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