Beyond Behavior: Linguistic Evidence of Cultural Variation in Parental Ethnotheories of Children's Prosocial Helping.

This study examined linguistic patterns in mothers' reports about their toddlers' involvement in everyday household work, as a way to understand the parental ethnotheories that may guide children's prosocial helping and development. Mothers from two cultural groups - US Mexican-heritage families with backgrounds in indigenous American communities and middle-class European-American families - were interviewed regarding how their 2- to 3-year-old toddler gets involved in help with everyday household work. The study's analytic focus was the linguistic form of mothers' responses to interview questions asking about the child's efforts to help with a variety of everyday household work tasks. Results showed that mothers responded with linguistic patterns that were indicative of ethnotheoretical assumptions regarding children's agency and children's prosocial intentions, with notable contrasts between the two cultural groups. Nearly all US Mexican-heritage mothers reported children's contributions and participation using linguistic forms that centered children's agency and prosocial initiative, which corresponds with extensive evidence suggesting the centrality of both children's autonomy and supportive prosocial expectations in how children's helpfulness is socialized in this and similar cultural communities. By contrast, middle-class European-American mothers frequently responded to questions about their child's efforts to help with linguistic forms that "pivoted" to either the mother as the focal agent in the child's prosocial engagement or to reframing the child's involvement to emphasize non-help activities. Correspondence between cultural differences in the linguistic findings and existing literature on socialization of children's prosocial helping is discussed. Also discussed is the analytic approach of the study, uncommon in developmental psychology research, and the significance of the linguistic findings for understanding parental ethnotheories in each community.

Care in Interaction: Aging, Personhood, and Meaningful Decline.

Care, as it is instantiated through interaction, can both perform and shape cultural and moral understandings of what it means to be a person in the world. American Catholic nuns have been found to age more "successfully" than their peers. However, in contrast to the successful aging paradigm, an analysis of care interactions from research conducted in a Franciscan Catholic convent in the Midwestern United States reveals that the nuns practice an ideal of meaningful decline. I explore how linguistic analysis of care interactions evidence ideologies of personhood and aging, and how a model of meaningful decline (the notion that valuable personhood endures beyond productivity) is instantiated through interaction.

Overcoming Elderspeak: A Qualitative Study of Three Alternatives.

Purpose: This study identifies genres of communication that avoid the features of elderspeak and successfully engage cognitively or physically affected older adults in rich communicative interaction. Design and Methods: The study examined 100 hr of audio- and video-recorded interaction between older Catholic nuns and their caregivers. The data were collected as part of a 7-year study on the linguistic and communicative factors that contribute to successful aging in a Catholic convent infirmary. Data analyzed in this article were selected from the corpus based on 2 criteria: (a) the interaction was absent of elderspeak and (b) the interaction was between a communicatively or cognitively impaired older adult and a caregiver. Results: Linguistic analysis of the interactions revealed 3 alternatives to elderspeak that maintain lexically and grammatically rich communication while maintaining minimal opportunity for communicative failure or breakdown. These include: (a) offered and requested blessings, (b) jokes, and (c) narratives. Implications: These 3 communicative strategies offer examples of lexically and grammatically complex ways to communicate with older adults who have little other opportunity for similarly complex interaction and may reduce resistiveness to care, and linguistic isolation, which has been linked to cognitive decline.