「子どもの認知発達に及ぼす母子間言語環境の影響」

抄録

This is a report of a study being conducted concurrently in Japan and in the U.S. for the purpose of cross-national comparison. The prepent authors are co-directors, organizing research teams in respective countries. Japanese data reported here were collected by a Japanese team and the U. S. data were credited to the American team.
Final analyses and interpretations are under progress. The present report is to be taken as a preliminary report and Azuma is responsible for the interpretations given here.
The Sample: 76 Japanese and 67 American mother-child pairs. The average age of the children were 3:8 at the start of the study. 16 Japanese agricultural samples and 7 dropouts were not included in the present report. Teacher studies were not included either. Other specifications.
Tests and inteviews: Confirming interview, CFI, SPD, MTQ, control strategy, BUC, PPVT, the second mother interview with DEQ Briefly explained according to the order of administration, interactive games using slides.
Table1. lists items where there were large differences between Japan and U. S. mothers from mothers' reports on what she did or she would do. There is a tendency that American mothers did try more structured and purposeful teaching than Japanese mothers did. In short, Japanese modal tendency was characterized as unstructured environmental enrichment approach and that of America was called structured intensional guidance approach. This checks with the finding of the ‘locus of control’ mothers found to appreciate parental role in shaping school achievement higher than do Japanese mothers. and Japanese mothers were found to ascribe more to natural capacity and the luck than do American mothers.
The picture given by the results of interactive games seemed to be in harmony with foregoing discussion.
The Japanese approach is characteristically “show all, let them choose”. The American apprapproach, on the contrary, is “you should see that they learn for sure what you have to teach”.
Differences in correlation between maternal variables and child performances were also of interest. Let us define an effective mother as the one who show styles positively correlated with high child performance.
The typical Japanese effective mother is: less direct command, lenient to task resistance, emotionally accepting (B); playful and enjoying, task free, less controling and less pressing (U); flexible and analytical (C).
The typical American effective mother is: clear orientation direct command, less cornpromizing with task resistance, demands verbalization,(B); control the situation, participating (U).
To sum up, while effective mothers have a lot in common in their opinions and expectations, actual tactics and strategies are quite different perhaps reflecting the difference of cultural background.
An attractive hypothesis is that the tactics and attitudes which are consistent with the prevailing culture relates more closely to the development of cognitive readiness in that culture. This hypothesis, however, has to be tested yet.
All these are very tentative and impressionistic generalizations, which of course should be revised after discussion with our colleagues. We are also aware of the need of identifying various types of maternal approaches rather than trying to draw overall pictures. At the present preliminary stage, this presentation is made to show that we have a good pros-pect of disclosing some interesting cross-cultural patterns through further analysis.