She thinks in English, but she wants in Mandarin: Differences in Singaporean bilingual English-Mandarin mothers’ mental-state-talk

Chinese-speaking parents are argued to use less cognitive mental-state-talk due to cultural goals of socializing children to follow an interdependence script. To extend this research, we investigated bilingual Mandarin-English Singaporean mothers who associate different functions for each language: English for schooling and Mandarin for in-group contexts. English and Mandarin maternal mental-state-talk from bilingual Mandarin-English mothers with their toddlers was examined. Mothers produced more cognitive terms in English than Mandarin and more desire terms in Mandarin than English. We show that mental-state-talk differs between bilingual parents’ languages, suggesting that mothers adjust their mental-state-talk to reflect each language’s function.