Predicting mother and child emotional availability in Singaporean bilingual English and Mandarin dyads: A multilevel approach to the specificity principle

Abstract When interacting with one another, bilingual caregivers and their young children can switch from language to another convey emotion information in meaningful ways. The Specificity Principle (Bornstein, 2017) states that specific setting conditions affect outcomes ways individuals at times. Here we tested three constituents of the Principle: We evaluated how used interaction (setting condition) differentially affects different dimensions emotional availability (outcomes) mothers (individuals). Twenty-six Singaporean English-Mandarin mother-child dyads (Mother M age = 33 years; Child age = 19 months) participated two counterbalanced play sessions, exclusively English Mandarin. Using recursive-partitioning analyses, assessed (i) child dominance, maternal availability, physiological synchrony accounted for (ii) overall availability. In agreement predictions Principle, our results show predictors mother differ according whether interacted her child's dominant or non-dominant language. findings suggest specificity influences quality interactions.