Cultural variations in maternal cognitive demand elicitation and child shyness during emergent literacy among Mexican American and Chinese American immigrant families

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Shared book reading is a culturally situated activity where maternal scaffolding may be adapted to a child's temperament. This study is grounded in Sigel's Psychological Distancing Model and Gutiérrez and Rogoff's framework of repertoires of practice to examine the relations among maternal elicitation, characterized by cognitive demand, child narrative production, and child shyness in low-income immigrant families. Participants were 147 mother-child dyads, split between Mexican American ( n = 64) and Chinese American ( n = 84) families, recruited from preschools in Northern California, USA. The parent-child interaction was captured during a 5-min audio-recorded shared reading session in their home language (Spanish or Cantonese). Every maternal utterance was coded into four levels of cognitive demand (yes/no, referential, behavioral, or inferential). Results showed that although Chinese American mothers utilized more questions across all cognitive demand levels, the proportional distribution of these levels and their positive associations with child utterances were largely consistent across both groups. Chinese American children produced more total utterances, but no group differences were found in mean length of utterance or total tokens, suggesting these differences were interactional rather than structural. A variable-centered analytic approach utilizing a two-way Multivariate Analysis of Variance and partial correlations showed that shy children navigate distinct communicative environments. Specifically, maternal inferential questions were negatively associated with child shyness among Mexican American dyads after controlling for demographic covariates, whereas maternal yes/no questions were positively associated with child shyness among Chinese American dyads. These findings underscore how universal cognitive scaffolding is functionally adapted to child temperament within specific cultural repertoires of practice and socialization goals.

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