Differences of kindergarten children's linguistic picture of the world: focus on Hungary, Russia, and Laos

Abstract

Three-to-five-year-old Laotian kindergarten children, native speakers of the Lao language were investigated in order to map the peculiarities of their picture of the world through their word associations. Results were contrasted to a previous comparative study of Hungarian and Russian kindergarteners of the same age aiming at revealing linguistic and cultural differences and similarities in this age group in the three aforementioned countries. Theories and methods of the Moscow School of Psycholinguistics were utilized for the cross-cultural comparison based on a Vygotskian cultural-historical approach, on Leontiev's speech activity theory, on the concept of verbal consciousness (linguistic picture of the world) and on the association experiment. A pedagogical perspective was incorporated through the application of the Conception of Childhood theory and the shoulder-to-shoulder method. Linguistic data gained during the association experiment was analysed by Sketch Engine, an online corpus linguistics research tool. The outcome of the investigation is a unique set of associations that on the one hand proves the overlapping of Lao children's picture of the world with Russian and Hungarian kindergarteners, on the other hand, sheds light on distinctive, culture- and language-specific characteristics of Laotian kindergarten children's verbal consciousness.