Fathers' and mothers' speech in early language development
- 1 June 1980
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Journal of Child Language
- Vol. 7 (2), 353-369
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000900002671
Abstract
Five French-speaking middle-class couples and their male only-children were tape-recorded separately at home while interacting verbally in a free-play, a story-telling, and in a family meal situation. The children's ages ranged from 1; 6 to 3; 0. The speech of the fathers, mothers, and children was transcribed and analysed for its semantic, syntactic, and language-teaching aspects. The results indicate that paternal speech displays the same simplification processes usually found in maternal speech to young children. Paternal speech, however, also contains some linguistic patterns at variance with those found in maternal speech. It is hypothesised that maternal and paternal speech may be complementary in their influence on language development in the children.Keywords
This publication has 1 reference indexed in Scilit:
- Adult perception of children’s speechPsychonomic Science, 1972