What parents bring to preschool children? Parental instructive speech and gestures, children’s learning and cultural differences

•Cross-cultural differences existed in the parents’ way to use speech and gestures.•Parental instructions demonstrated different facilitating effects across cultures.•Chinese caregivers tended to provide their children with instructions.•Culture moderated the instructions–children’s learning relationship.•Speech instructions exerted more facilitating effects in the Chinese group. Instructions via speech and gestures provided by caregivers can facilitate children’s learning. However, caregivers with different cultural backgrounds demonstrate diverse parental behaviors, which exert influences on children’s learning in different ways. The current study aimed to explore the cultural differences between Chinese and American caregivers in regard to the way they use speech and gestures to instruct their children. The potential cross-cultural differences in the facilitating effects of parental instructions on children’s learning were also examined. Two groups of children aged 3–4 years and their caregivers from China and the U.S. were invited to participate in our study (34 from China and 35 from the U.S.). The caregivers assisted their children in working with a difficult puzzle task. The caregivers’ speech and gestural instructions from both cultural groups, as well as the children’s learning performance, were coded and analyzed. The results showed that relative to the caregivers in the U.S., those from China provided more instructions to their children. Cultural background was a significant moderator in the relationship between parental instructions and children’s learning performance, namely, speech instructions provided by Chinese caregivers had a more effective facilitating influence on their children’s learning than did those provided by American caregivers.