She thinks in english, but she wants in mandarin: Differences in singaporean bilingual english-mandarin maternal mental-state-talk

Chinese-speaking parents are believed to use less cognitive mental-state-talk than their English-speaking counterparts on account of their cultural goals in socializing their children to follow an interdependence script. Here, we investigated bilingual English-Mandarin Singaporean mothers who associate different functions for each language as prescribed by their government: English for school and Mandarin for in-group contexts. English and Mandarin maternal mental-state-talk from bilingual English-Mandarin mothers with their toddlers was examined. Mothers produced more ''cognitive"terms in English than in Mandarin and more ''desire"terms in Mandarin than in English. We show that mental-state-talk differs between bilingual parents' languages, suggesting that mothers adjust their mental-state-talk to reflect the functions of each language.