European Journal of Psychology of Education 2001, Vol. XVI, n' 2,223-231 © 2001, I.S.P.A.
Conversational styles of mothers with different value priorities: Comparing Estonian mothers in Estonia and Sweden Tiia Tulviste Luule Kants University ofTartu, Estonia and Sodertorn University, Sweden
The present study's aim was to compare the conversational style and value preferences of mothers in Estonian families living in Estonia and Sweden. Early adolescent children (10 to 13 years old) and their mothers were videotaped at their homes during mealtime. All regulatory utterances were identified, and differentiated into two groups depending on whether their aim was to control behavior or elicit talk. Attempting to link the hypothesized socio-cultural variation in regulatory speech to a broader beliefsystem, a number ofquestionnaire items on valuesfrom the Schwartz's Value Survey (Schwartz & Bilsky, 1987) were administered to the mothers. As expected, the analyses revealed differences in the conversational intentions of the Estonian-speaking mothers living in two different countries. Mothers in Estonia were significantly more concerned with controlling early adolescents' behavior than mothers in Sweden. Responses to value items supported the real-life findings, showing that mothers in Sweden valued significantly higher the value domains ofAchievement and Self-direction than mothers in Estonia.
Introduction A number of studies have reported a distinction between two maternal conversational styles: conversation-eliciting and directive style (Lieven, 1978; McDonald & Pien, 1982; Nelson, 1981; Pan, Imbens-Bailey, Winner, & Snow, 1996; Snow, 1977). These styles have been argued to reflect differences in mothers' intentions while interacting with their children: some mothers are primarily concerned with engaging children into conversation while others put stronger emphasis on directing and controlling children's physical behavior. Besides individual differences, it has been found that maternal intentions change as children grow older: the directive intents decline while conversation-eliciting intents increase (Pan et a!., Research for this article was supported by a grant from the Baltic Sea Foundation in Sweden (No. 31OJA), and by grants from the Estonian Science Foundation (No. 3002 & 4629). We would like to thank all participating families.
224
T. TULVISTE & L. KANTS
1996). It has been demonstrated that children whose mothers talk more have better linguistic abilities, for example, bigger vocabulary (Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer, & Lyons, 1991). Dominantly directive maternal styles have been found to influence children's social and cognitive development, resulting in lower IQ scores, as well as in lower achievement motivation (see Beyer, 1995). Ninio and Snow (1988) have seen the growth in intention to communicate with children at a certain age as a source of growth in children's syntax and lexicon. Comparative research on maternal regulatory language has revealed cultural differences in mothers' interactional intentions. For example, Estonian mothers of toddlers were found to be more interested in controlling the children's behavior than mothers from Sweden and the US (Junefelt & Tulviste, 1997). The same distinction held true for teenagers' mothers in Estonia and in the US (Tulviste, 2000). On the other hand, the frequency of conversation-eliciting utterances used by two-year-olds' mothers revealed that less verbalization was expected from toddlers in Estonia than in Sweden and the US. Cross-cultural comparison of mothers' interactions with adolescents in Estonia and the US indicated no cultural differences in the mothers' attempts to prompt conversational participation of their children. Interestingly, all these mothers had middle-class or upper-middle-class background. Thus, the Estonian mothers' considerably more direct conversational style challenged the wide-spread belief held by the researchers of this field that controlling maternal style is something typical of the working class, and conversation-eliciting maternal style is - in contrast - a characteristically middle-class phenomenon (cf. Heath, 1983; Hoff-Ginsberg, 1991; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). The peculiarities of language appear to playa comparatively insignificant role in determining the maternal conversational style - this notion is supported by the results of two separate studies showing that despite the common language, more direct regulatory speech is used in Great Britain (Halle & Schatz, 1994) than in the US (Bellinger, 1979). At the same time, no direct comparison has been made to prove this point beyond doubt. The question to what degree is the mothers' use of regulatory language determined by the peculiarities of language and/or culture is still far from being clear. Therefore, comparing conversational styles of mothers talking the same language but living in different countries provided us with an opportunity to shed some light on this question. The present work attempts to study this problem by comparing conversational styles of Estonian mothers living in Estonia with those of Estonian mothers living in Sweden. Based on the results of previous comparative studies, it was predicted that similarly to the Swedishspeaking toddlers' mothers in Sweden, the Estonian-speaking mothers living in Sweden use language more to converse with the child and less to direct the child's behavior than the Estonian mothers in Estonia. An opportunity to compare the conversational styles of mothers speaking the same language but living in two different countries around the Baltic Sea - in Estonia and Sweden - arose in consequence of World War II, when numerous Estonian families fled to neighboring countries from the Soviet regime, and at the same time close historical and cultural bonds between these countries were destroyed by five decades of occupation in Estonia. In August 1991, Estonia regained independence and started to reestablish historical and cultural relationships with its Nordic neighbors. There are many similar traits in these countries, such as their prevalently Protestant-Lutheran religious traditions, and consequent moral and ethical ideology. Although Estonia is currently undergoing big economic and societal changes and striving towards Westernization, it is possible that the mothers' own upbringing during the Soviet occupation when conforming and adjusting to the communist system and a uniform socialization ideology was expected and greatly stressed, still influences the way they socialize their children. As to the Estonian language, it belongs to the Fenno-Ugric language family, and is an agglutinating language with a large number of cases, lacking grammatical future and grammatical gender. Little research has been devoted to other reasons why some mothers tend to have more direct style of conversation while talking with their children than other mothers. It seems only reasonable to expect that the mothers' belief systems influence the ways they relate to the world, including their views on such principal matters as raising children into responsible and
CONVERSATIONAL STYLE AND VALVES
225
well-adjusted! members of the society. As it is obvious that such beliefs are embedded in cultural context, and transferred in culturally and socially coherent ways, it is also relevant to gain knowledge on the underlying cultural dimensions. It has been repeatedly stressed that the prevailing values (or rather, value priorities) playa central role in any society, any culture, relating to all aspects of behavior. People draw upon their cultural values to choose appropriate behaviors while performing their social roles (cf. Smith & Schwartz, 1996). Thus, to obtain information on a possible source of expected differences in the shared language/different cultural context setting of our study we investigated the mothers' value preferences using a selection of value domains from the Schwartz's Value Survey (Schwartz & Bilsky, 1987). According to this theory, values are concepts or beliefs about desirable end-states or actions, transcend concrete situations, direct our choices, and are hierarchically ordered. In a number of cross-cultural studies conducted altogether in 44 countries (e.g. Schwartz, 1994; Schwartz & Bilsky, 1987, 1990; Schwartz & Sagiv, 1995) Schwartz and his co-workers identified ten motivationally distinct universal value domains: Power, Achievement, Hedonism, Stimulation, Self-direction, Universalism, Benevolence, Tradition, Conformity, and Security. For the purpose of our study we concentrated on values related to Power, Achievement, Self-direction, Tradition, and: Conformity. In a previous work, the Estonian sample was found to score low on values reflecting autonomy and high on conservatism, unlike the only Nordic sample in this study - the Finnish sample (Schwartz, 1994). A comparative study of students from three countries found Estonians scoring high on power, whereas Swedes low, and Finns in-between (Verkasalo, Daun, & Niit, 1994). Consistently with these findings, a comparative study of parents' expectations for their children's behavior in Sweden and India revealed the Swedish parents' highest emphasis on independence and assertiveness (Ekstrand & Ekstrand, 1985). Although it is obvious that the major cultural changes that have taken place in Eastern Europe since the beginning of 1990ies require us to update our information about Estonia's position on any salient cultural dimension, we expected the bicultural Estonian mothers raising their children in Sweden to differ from the monocultural Estonian mothers in their value statements, and to value Self-direction and Achievement more highly, but Power, Tradition, and Conformity less highly. Also, the relationship between regulatory language and maternal value preferences was investigated. We expected that the mothers scoring high on Self-direction tend to control their children's behavior less frequently as they are more focused on generating independent and creative behavior in children than other mothers.
Method Participants
40 Estonian families with early adolescent children (10 to 13 years old, M=11.28, SD=1.09) were videotaped at their homes during mealtime, and the mothers were asked to complete a questionnaire on value preferences. 20 families consisted of Estonians living in Estonia; 20 families consisted of descendants of Estonian World War II refugees residing in Sweden, and Estonian families who immigrated to Sweden in the beginning of the last decade when the Soviet occupation collapsed. As there appeared no significant differences between the two groups of Estonians living in Sweden in later statistical analyses, the distinction is henceforth ignored. The target children's gender distribution was rather even in all samples, 8 boys and 12 girls in the sample residing in Estonia, and 10 boys and 10 girls in the families residing in Sweden. The first group's native language was Estonian (a Finno-Ugric language), whereas the families in the second group were bilingual, using eminently Estonian language, but sometimes also Swedish (a North German language) language depending on a particular topic and/or situation. The suitable participants were identified through elementary schools, including the Estonian School in Stockholm. Letters shortly describing the study were sent to
T. TULVISTE & L. KANTS
226
the early adolescents' families asking to indicate their willingness to participate. The Estonian data were collected in Tallinn and Tartu. In terms of education, all parents had completed at least high school and had some college training. Thirteen Estonian mothers living in Estonia, and 15 Estonian mothers living in Sweden had at least university degree. The families were rather heterogeneous, the father's presence and the number of family members varied considerably. To make the samples as comparable as possible, this study concentrates on analyzing the mother-early adolescent interaction. Procedure
Video recordings were made at early adolescents' homes at meals. The families were asked to behave as they 'normally' would and to ignore the fact of being recorded as much as possible. The recorder interacted minimally with the participants during video recorded meals. The mean duration of a meal was 15.48 min (SD=5.91 min) in Estonia and 19.87 min (SD=8.44 min) in Sweden. All video recordings were transcribed using the CHAT transcri ption system (MacWhinney, 1991). In the transcriptions of the video material all mothers' regulatory utterances aimed at the target children were identified. Regulatory utterances were defined as utterances directed towards the conversational partner to give commands or permission, request or encourage desirable action, disencourage or prevent undesirable action, and the attempts to prompt the conversational partner to talk. These utterances were identified and coded. The category system for analyzing regulatory utterances was the same as in the study of McDonald and Pien (1982). In this system, regulatory utterances were divided into the following two categories, depending on their aim: 1. eliciting talk: utterances urging verbal behavior of the child (e.g. "What did you eat for lunch today");
2. controlling behavior: utterances prompting or constraining physical behavior of the child (e.g. "Come on, eat the dessert now!") or seeking to attract, direct, or redirect the child's attention (e.g. "Listen!"). Interrater reliability. Regulatory utterances were judged by two independent judges with more than 91% cases of agreement for all protocols. Disagreements were resolved through discussion, scrutinizing the videorecordings. The value questionnaire was based on a selection of culturally universal motivational value domains identified by Schwartz and Bilsky (1987), namely, Power (authority, social power, wealth), Achievement (successful, ambitious, capable, influential), Self-direction (values like creativity, choosing one's own goals, curious, freedom-loving, independent), Tradition (devout, humble, moderate, respect for tradition, accepting one's portion in life), and Conformity (obedient, self-discipline, honoring parents and elders, politeness). The mothers were asked to indicate to what extent were these values seen as guiding principles in their lives on a Likert-type scale from -1 ("opposed to my values") and 0 ("of no importance") to 5 ("of supreme importance").
Results The total number of maternal regulatory utterances coded was 597 for mothers living in Estonia, and 863 for Estonian mothers living in Sweden. There were big individual differences in the regulatory speech variables, and the duration of meals varied considerably in different families. For this reason the regulatory speech variables were later analyzed in terms of frequencies per minute.
CONVERSATIONAL STYLE AND VALVES
227
The regulatory speech A one-way ANOVA for eliciting talk per minute revealed no significant country effect (p>.05). Mothers living in Estonia did not use this type of utterances significantly less than mothers in Sweden, respectively, M=1.66 (SD=1.39), and M=1.98 (SD=1.34). However, an ANOVA for the frequency of controlling the target children's behavior revealed a significant main effect of Country (Estonia vs. Sweden), F(1,38)=1O.87, p=.002. The mothers residing in Estonia (M=O.50, SD=O.35) controlled more frequently the target children's behavior than mothers residing in Sweden (M=O.21, SD=O.16).
Mothers' conversational style In order to characterize the extent to which individual mothers engaged in conversationeliciting versus directive communicative styles, at each observation the ratio of conversationeliciting to controlling behavior regulatory utterances was calculated. Although the mean ratio of conversation-eliciting utterances to behavior-controlling utterances in the Swedish-Estonian sample was significantly higher (M=14.64) than in the sample living in Estonia (M=4.23), t(36)=2.74, both samples embodied mothers who displayed clearly whether the conversationeliciting style or the directive style. The following episode illustrates a mother whose typical style of interacting with her early adolescent daughter is controlling: Child: Mother: Sister: Mother: Sister: Mother: Mother: Mother: Mother:
emme vaata kui ilus kiisu! (Mom look what a beautiful kitten!) pane ta lira palun! (put it away please!) emme kas nii kovasti voib panna (raadio)? (Mom can I play (the radio) so loud?) palun (vii kass ara)! (please (put the cat away)!) emme emme! (Mom Mom!) nat> vaiksemaks palun (raadio)! (a bit more quietly please (the radio)!) mine pese kaed ara! (go wash your hands!) Kai! pese # veega! (wash # with water!)
In contrast, another mother was more engaged in conversation-eliciting style, which was also reflected by her remarkably high ratio of conversation-eliciting to behavior-controlling utterances. Mother: Child: Mother: Child: Mother: Child: Mother: Child: Mother: Child: Mother: Child: Mother: Mother: Mother: Child:
nii 0,* oli sui midagi uudist koolis? (so # did you have any news at school?) [::!shakes her head]. mitte midagi? (nothing?) o [::!shakes her head]. # mis juhtus vtii midagi mis oli erilist voi +..? (# that happened or was somehow special or +..?) o [:::!shakes her head]. KeIli # on tagasi? (Kelli # is back?) o [eInods]. ei kai enam karkudega? (does not walk with crutches anymore?) ei (no). jalg terve? «her) foot is fine?) Laura kuuendast kaib karkudega (Laura from the sixth (grade) walks with crutches). Laura? oota kes see niiiid see Laura on? (wait who is this now this Laura?) kas rna # arvad et rna tean teda? (do I # (do you) think I know her?) [=! shakes her head] no.
o
228
T. TULVISTE & L. KANTS
Mothers' value preferences Table I presents the mean values and standard deviations for Schwartz's motivational value domains for Estonian mothers in Estonia and Sweden.
Table I Mean values and standard deviations per sample and results of one-way ANOVA for Schwartz's value domains M(SD)
Self-direction Achievement Power Tradition Conformity
One-way ANOV A
EstEst(n=20)
SweEst(n=20)
F(1,38)
p
20.45(4.66) 12.45(3.80) 8.70(3.03) 7.95(4.32) 11.85(3.28)
23.55(3.32) 15.50(3.44) 10.45(4.66) 9.55(3.66) 13.15(3.15)
5.87 7.07 1.98 1.60 1.63
.02 .01 ns ns ns
Note. EstEst=Estonians in Estonia; SweEst=Estonians in Sweden; Ils=p>.05.
An ANOVA for the value domain of Self-direction showed a significant main effect of Country (Estonia vs. Sweden), F(l,38)=5.87, p=.02; the mothers living in Sweden valued creativity, choosing own goals, curiousness, freedom, and independence significantly more than mothers living in Estonia. An ANOVA for the Achievement domain indicated also a significant effect of Country (Estonia vs. Sweden), F(I,38)=7.07, p=.Ol; Estonian mothers residing in Sweden gave sign ificantly higher scores to values like ambitious, capable, influential, and successful than mothers in Estonia. As the number of participating families was rather small due to the nature of our study (i.e. real-life observational data in addition to attitudinal reports), no significant correlations appeared between the types of regulatory language and the value domains. Both Self-direction and Achievement had a negative but unsignificant (p>.05) correlation with controlling behavior per minute (respectively, r=O.21 and r=-.12) and with eliciting talk per minute (respectively, r=-.l7 and r=-.15). One-way ANOVAs revealed no Gender (Boys vs. Girls) effects on the regulatory language used by mothers towards boys and girls. Lastly, there was no significant effect of the mothers' educational level. There were no differences in the regulatory speech and value preferences between mothers with university education and those without it.
Discussion Although it was found that Estonian mothers from both countries (Estonia and Sweden) favored conversing with early adolescents over controlling their behavior, the hypothesis according to which the mothers residing in Estonia use considerably more controlling regulatory language than their bicultural counterparts in Sweden was confirmed. Thus, the results were consistent with the previous studies where Estonian mothers were found to exhibit more direct and controlling conversational style towards their children than Swedish and American mothers (Junefelt & Tulviste, 1997; Tulviste, 2000). The current study demonstrated that Estonian mothers living in Estonia produce more direct speech not only in comparison to mothers from other countries whose mother tongue is different, but also in comparison to
CONVERSATIONAL STYLE AND VALUES
229
Estonian-speaking mothers residing in a different country and being influenced by a diverse cultural environment. The fact that mothers who share the same linguistic system differ in this respect supports the notion that the ways mothers talk seem to depend rather on the effect of socio-cultural context than on the peculiarities of language. The second question addressed in the study was the socio-cultural variation in the mothers' value preferences. We found mothers living in Sweden to value self-direction and achievement significantly higher than mothers living in Estonia. Differences in prompting values related to self-direction emerged according to our expectations, confirming the results of previous research. Theoretically, the link between emphasizing a person's need for autonomy and reduced verbal control seems rather logical. The fact that mothers in Sweden were less concerned with directing and controlling teenagers' behavior than in Estonia could be also explained by the Swedish "equality ideology" (see Welles-Nystrom, 1996). Sweden has been claimed to be a country with extreme concern for equality as such, but also for equality between family members. The reason why the Estonian mothers living in Estonia were found to put considerably more effort into controlling the teenagers' behavior may be their own upbringing during the Soviet occupation in Estonia when conforming and adjusting to the communist system and a uniform socialization ideology was expected and greatly stressed. The results of the current study show that although Estonia is undergoing big societal changes and striving towards Westernalization, a change to more democratic socialization styles (from parental emphasis on obedience to emphasis on autonomy and self-direction) has apparently not taken place yet. A recent longitudinal study (yearly measurement from March 1991 to November 1995) striving to capture the changes in the Estonian value system during the years of transformation from a post-Communist to a Western society, registered - on one hand - the Estonians' weaker emphasis on egalitarian values in comparison to the Swedes, and on the other hand an increasing importance attached to equality among the Estonian respondents (Lauristin & Vihalemm, 1997). Thus, it seems likely that it is yet too early to make broad generalizations about the Estonian parents' prevalent socialization styles. However, as raising children is one of the major tasks of every society, it seems of utmost importance to register the direction of probable changes in the parents' belief systems, simultaneously linking such data to real-life observable behavior. In sum, although according to our data the effect of socio-cultural context appears to prevail over the effect of language peculiarities, it needs further investigation to what extent is this finding explainable by differences in the mothers' value preferences or other culturally determined attitudes.
References Bellinger, D. (1979). Changes in the explicitness of mothers' directives as children age. Journal of Child Language. 18, 41-49. Beyer, S. (1995) Maternal employment and children's academic achievement: Parenting style as mediating variable. Developmental Review, 15,212-253. Ekstrand, G., & Ekstrand, L.H. (1985). Patterns of socialization in different cultures: The cases of Sweden and India. In R. Diaz-Guerrero (Ed.), Cross-cultural and national studies in social psychology. Selected papers from the XXIIIth International Congress of Psychology (vol. 2, pp. 225-244). Amsterdam: North-Holland. Halle, T., & Shatz, M. (1994). Mothers' social regulatory language to young children in family settings. First Language. 14,83-104. Heath, S. (1983). Ways with words: Language. life and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, Hoff-Ginsberg, E. (1991). Mother-child conversation in different social classes and communicative settings. Child Development, 62, 782-796. Huttenlocher, J., Haight, W., Bryk, A., Seltzer, M., & Lyons, T. (1991). Early vocabulary growth: Relation to language input and gender. Developmental Psychology, 27,236-248.
T . TULVISTE & L. KANTS
230
Junefelt, K.• & Tul viste, T. (1997). Regulation and praise in American, Estonian, and Swedish mother-child interaction. Mind. Culture, and Activity: An lntem ational Journal. 4, 24-33. Lauri st in, M.. & Viha lemm, T. (19 97). Cha nging value systems: Civi lizationaJ shift and local dif ference s. In M. Lauristin, P. Vihalemm, K. E. Rosengren, & L. Weibull (Eds.), Return to the Western world: Cultural and political perspectives on the Estonian post -communist transition (pp. 243-263). Tartu, Estonia: Tartu University Press. Lieven, E.V.M. (1978). Conversations between mothers and young children: Individual differences and their possible impli cations for the study of language le arning. In N. Waterson & C. Snow (Eds .), Tire deve lopme nt of commu nication. New York: Wiley. MacWhinney, B. (199 1). The childs' project: Tools for analyzing talk. Hillsdale. NJ: LEA. Mclxmald, L., & Pien, D. (1982) . Mother conversational behaviour as a function of interactional intent. Journal of Child Languag e. 9, 337-358. Nelson , K. (1981). Indi vidual differences in language development : Implications for de velopment and language. Developmental Psychology. 17, 170-187. Ninio, A., & Snow, C. (1988). Language acquisition through language use: The functional sources of children 's early utterances. In Y. Levi, I. Schlesinger, & M. Braine (Eds.), Persp ectives on a theory of language acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Pan, B.A ., Irnbens-Bailey, A., Winner, K., & Snow, C. (1996). Com mun icative intents expressed by paren ts in interaction with young children. Merrill -Palmer Quarterly. 42, 248-267. Schieffelin, B.B., & Ochs, E. (1986). Language socialization. Annual Review ofAnthropo logy, 15, 163-191. Schw artz, S .H. ( 1994). Be yond indiv id ua lis m/c o llec tiv ism: New c ultu ra l dim en si on s of values. In U.K im, H.C. Triandis, C. Kagitcibasi, S.C. Choi, & G. Yoon (Eds.), Individualism and collectivism: Theory. method. and appli cations. Newbury Park. CA: Sage. Schwartz. S.H., & Bilsky, W. (1987). Towards a psychological structure of human values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53. 550-562. Schwartz, S.H., & Bilsky, W. ( 1990). To ward a theory of the universal structure and content of values: Extensions and cross-cultural replications. Journal ofPersonality and Social Psychology. 58, 878-89 1. Schwartz, S.H .• & Sagiv, L. (1995). Identifying culture-specifics in the content and structure of values. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. 26. 92· 116. Smith, P.B.• & Schwartz. S.H. (1996). Values. In J.W. Berry, Y.H. Poortinga, J. Pandey, P.R. Dasen, T.S . Saraswathi, M.H. Segall, & C. Kagitcibasi (Eds.), Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology (vol. 3, pp. 77-118). Needh am Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Snow, C. ( 1977). Developmen t of conversation between mothers and babies. Journa l of Child Language. 4, 1-22. Tulviste, T. (2000). Socialization at meals : A comparison of American and Estonian mother-adolescent interaction. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psyc hology, 31, 537-556. Verkasalo, M., Daun, 101-117.
A., &
Niit, T. ( 1994). Universal values in Estonia, Finland and Sweden. Ethnologia Europa ea, 24.
Welles-Nystrom, B. (1996). Scenes from a marrige: Equality ideology in Swedish family policy, maternal ethnotheo ries, and practice. In S. Harkness & C.M. Super (Eds.), Parents ' cultural belief systems : Their origins, expressio ns. and consequences (pp. 192-214). New York: Guilford.
L 'o bjectif de cette etude eta it fa co mpa raiso n du sty le de fa co nve rsat io n e t d es vale urs p referees des meres des jamilles estoniennes habitant en Estonie et en Suede. De jeu nes adolescents (de 10 a 13 ans) et leurs meres ont erefilm es chez eux pendant leurs repas. Toutes les expressions regulatrices ont ere identifiees et divisees en deux groupes selon leur obj ectif: dans Ie pr emier etaient celles qui visaient a regler Ie comportement. dans Ie second cel/es qui visaient a
231
CONVERSATIONAL STYLE AND VALUES
faire parler l'enfant. Pour trouver un lien entre la variation socioculturelle supposee de la conversation regulatrice et un systeme des convictions plus general, un certain nombre de questions du questionnaire sur les valeurs de I'Enquete des valeurs de Schwartz (Schwartz & Bilsky, 1987) a ere pose aux meres. Comme prevu, l'analyse a revele une difference entre les intentions de la conversation des meres par/ant estonien et habitant dans les deux pays differents. Les meres en Estonie cherchaient beaucoup plus regler la conduite de leurs enfants, jeunes adolescents, que les meres en Suede. Les reponses aux questions concernant les valeurs confirment les resultats de I' etude de la vie reelle, en indiquant que les meres en Suede attribuent beaucoup plus de valeur a la reussite et a I'autodirection que les meres en Estonie.
a
Key words: Estonian, Mother-early adolescent interaction, Regulatory speech, Value priorities.
Received: May 2000 Revision received: January 2001
Tiia Tulviste. Department of Psychology, University of Tartu, Tiigi 78-336, 50410 Tartu, Estonia. E-mail:
[email protected] Current theme of research:
Mother-child interaction. Social development. Cross-cultural psychology. M~st relevant publications in the field ofPsychology ofEducation: Tulviste, T. (2000). Socialization at meals: A comparison of American and Estonian mother-adolescent interaction. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 31,537-556. Tulviste, T. (1998;. How much talk is expected from Estonian children. Trames, 2,120-129. Junefelt, K., & Tulviste, T. (1997). Regulation and praise in American, Estonian, and Swedish mother-child interaction. Mind, Culture, and Activity: An International Journal, 4,24-33 Tulviste, T., & Raudsepp, M. (1997). The conversational style of Estonian mothers. First Language, 17, 151-163. Tulviste, T. (1997). Semantic awareness of the word: Some theoretic and methodological issues. Psychology of Language and Communication, I, 63-70.
Luule Kants. Department of Psychology, University of Tartu, Tiigi 78-336, 50410 Tartu Estonia. E-mail:
[email protected] Current rheme of research:
Comparative research on family socialization. Cultural values. Individualism/collectivism.
