The Learner > Psychology
Socialisation
One relatively stable aspect of Chinese culture is the syntactic structure of its language. Moreover, this language displays at least one distinctive feature that is relevant to some of the contrasts made here in relation to modes of thought. This concerns the contrast between nouns and verbs and its relation to the contrast between how the world is perceptually analysed: as discrete things set against local contexts, versus systems of relationships.
In linguistic terms, categories are denoted by nouns. Things are identified or named with this part of speech. Relationships, on the other hand, are managed through verbs. In particular, transitive verbs such as “throwing”, “grasping”, “selling”, and so forth. It should be not surprising to discover that a child learning its native language finds verbs harder to acquire and remember. Thus, children learn nouns first (Gentner, 1981). However, this generalisation is not universal. Tardif (1996) has shown that East Asian children (including those from China) learn verbs at the same rate as nouns. In these languages, verbs are more salient in terms of their positioning within sentence structure. It follows that these children perform more slowly in games that are designed to feature skills relevant to categorisation (Gopnik and Choi, 1990).
It is probably fair to say that theories emphasising causal relations between language and thought are not as attractive as they once were. However, there is a route whereby this relationship can be preserved as a credible and attractive part of how we understand distinctive cognitive styles. That route is found in the patterns of childhood socialisation: language and activity that parents organise with their children. Socialisation is significantly achieved through adults scaffolding the management of language in their socialising contact with children (Heath, 1983; Tizard and Hughes, 1984).
Accordingly, Fernald and Morikawa (1993) show that East Asian parents are far less preoccupied with nouns and naming in their talk to children. Moreover, other structural aspects of language appear to link into patterns of talk exercised by parents. These languages are much more contextual, with words having more multiple meanings. Accordingly, understanding depends a lot on how contexts deployed get used to disambiguate meaning. For example, there are different words for personal pronouns, according to the context in which the person is. While middle class American parents work hard to decontextualise language for their children (Heath, 1982), this is a less compelling strategy in families where Asian languages are governing early conversations.
These differences in child communication practices extend further than these examples that are guided by linguistic structure. Cultural values are visible within other aspects of adult-child interaction. So developmental psychologists have noted how Western parents are much more likely to create situations in which their children are expected to act with independence. Stewart, Bond, Dees and Chung (1999) document this in relation to how childrearing patterns are built upon varying expectations of autonomy for children.
A related observation comes from the work of Han, Leichtman and Wang (1998) comparing Chinese and US children of 4-5 years who were asked to give narrative accounts of their day to day lives. The Western children were far more likely to refer to themselves than others in these accounts. They were also more likely to refer to emotional states.
This last point has also been linked to patterns of socialisation associated with parental communication. Fernald and Morikawa (1993) report that when East Asian mothers were talking with the children about events in a play situation, they were more likely to refer to objects and characters in that play in terms of possible emotional states – rather than, say, their material or spatial characteristics. Accordingly, Masuda and Nisbett (2001) report that East Asian children, in looking at animals and talking about them, were more likely to attend to them holistically and more likely to report emotional states in what they could see.
We have drawn attention here to language and patterns of communication within parenting that are implicated in the cultivation of distinctive modes of thought and analysis. However, there are clearly other agents and institutions of socialisation that exist outside of the family. Evidently, teachers and schooling defines one set of such circumstances that need attention as part of the social structure that sustains these modes of thought. We move towards a consideration of this next.
The empirical observations that have been summarised so far are clearly relevant to claims that have been made about culturally distinct modes of learning. The nature of those claims for psychological difference that are made for the specific domain of learning will be taken up in the next section.
References
Fernald, A. and Morikawa, H. .(1993). Common themes and cultural variation in Japanese and American mothers’ speech to infants. Child Development, 64, 637-656.
Gentner, D. (1981). Some interesting differences between verbs and nouns. Cognition and Brain Theory, 4, 161-178.
Gopnick, A., & Choi, S. (1990). Do linguistic differences lead to cognitive differences? A cross-linguistic study of semantic and cognitive development. First Language, 10, 199-215.
Han, J. J., Leichtman, M. D., & Wang, Q. (1998). Autobiographical memory in Korean, Chinese, and American children. Developmental Psychology, 34, 701-713.
Heath, S.B. (1982) What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home an school. Language in Society 11, 49-79.
Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Masuda, T., & Nisbett, R. E. (2001). Attending holistically versus analytically: Comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, 992-934.
Stewart, S.M., Bond, M.H., Deeds, O. & Chung, S.F. (1999). Intergenerational patterns of values and autonomy expectations in cultures of relatedness and separateness. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 30, 575-593.
Tardif, T. (1996). Nouns are not always learned before verbs: Evidence from mandarin-speakers early vocabularies. Developmental Psychology, 32, 492-504.
Tizard, B., & Hughes, M. (1984). Young children learning, talking and thinking at home and at school. London: Fontana.