A Cross-cultural Comparative Study between Chinese and Japanese Preschool Educators’ Use of Mental State Language in Interactions With Children

Abstract

Abstract Mental state language (MSL) is a language used to describe individual internal states including one’s desire, emotion, perception and cognition. This study compared Chinese and Japanese preschool educators’ use of MSL in interactions with preschool children. Based on ecological systems of educator-child interactions, it analyzed 12 Chinese and 12 Japanese native preschool educators’ use of MSL in interactions with children considering the contextual factors (e.g. educator-child ratio and activity settings). The corpus analysis involved 8453 clauses from spontaneous 30-mintute spontaneous interactions during free play. The findings reveled that Japanese educators used a significantly higher proportion MSL compared to the Chinese educators. Among the four types of MSL, the Chinese educators uttered Cognition with higher frequency and more diverse cognitive terms, while the Japanese cohort used more Desire and Emotion with abundant emotional expressions. Child age is identified as a significant factor influencing educators’ use of MSL. The study discussed how Japanese and Chinese preschool educators provide distinct language experiences for children in different cultural-linguistic contexts, which has implications for worldwide preschool education in multicultural contexts.