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Father and other strangers: Men''s speech to young children

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... However, other studies reported that men tend to challenge their children during conversation by using more interruptions and parallel talk compared to women (Greif, 1980), more rare words (Gleason, 1975;Muchnik & Stavans, 2009), more open questions (Kokkinaki, 2013), requests for clarification (Masur & Gleason, 1980;Ratner, 1988 AQ5 ; Rondal, 1980), as well as more directives, open questions, and wh-questions compared to women (Kokkinaki, 2013;Leaper et al., 1998;McLaughlin et al.,1983;Tomasello et al., 1990). There is also some evidence that men are less sensitive to their children's interest and level of knowledge as efficiently as women during conversation. ...
... Men produced significantly more directives than women in the dyadic context of play (Nandy et al., 2021). Men have been suggested to be less finely tuned to the child and more cognitively demanding conversational partners, probably because they spend less time with their children compared to women (Gleason, 1975). ...
... Two main hypotheses were raised to explain the difference in CDS between women and men: (a) Women have an evolutionary biological/neurological advantage over men that directs women to be more sensitive to their offspring in terms of attachment, communication, and vocalizations (de Pisapia et al., 2013;Geary, 2000;Hrdy, 1999;Joseph, 2000), and (b) the "bridge hypothesis" (Gleason, 1975), suggesting that men, who usually spend less time with their children, serve as a bridge between the home environment and the outside world. Thus, men provide their children with conversational experience with partners with whom children share less background knowledge. ...
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Purpose Differences between child-directed speech (CDS) by women and men are generally explained by either biological-evolutionary or gender-social theories. It is difficult to tease these two explanations apart for different-sex–parent families because women are usually also the main caregivers. Thus, this study aims to examine the influence of parental sex on CDS by investigating men and women who are in same-sex–parent families. Method Twenty same-sex–parent families participated in the study—10 families in which the parents were two men and 10 families in which the parents were two women. The families were matched for toddler age (range: 9–24 months) and sex. CDS was recorded using the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) device for 16 hr during a day. Each parent was also audio-recorded during a 30-min play session with his or her child. Results No difference was found between men and women across all the LENA measures, namely, adult word count, conversational turns count, and child vocalization count. The analysis of speech samples during parent–child play showed no difference between men and women in mean length of utterance and number of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Pragmatic speech acts of initiations, responses to infants' actions, or vocalizations were similar in both sexes. Women used more “teaching” utterances than men, and men who were main caregivers used more “teaching” utterances than men who were secondary caregivers. Across both sexes, secondary caregivers used more “requests for actions” compared to main caregivers. Conclusions The present findings support a functional–social approach and not a biological approach for explaining the use of CDS by men and women. These findings have clinical implications on the involvement of men in early intervention programs.
... Therefore, interaction is important in children's language acquisition. Related to this, Gleason (1975) stated that children do not acquire language alone, but interaction with caregivers helps their language acquisition. ...
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PParentese in each community has its own characteristics. This study aims to describe the interaction between caregivers and infants with a case study in two Javanese families living in the Wonosobo urban area (mother, babysitter, grandmother, and baby aged 0;4 [K1] and 1;6 [K2]), Central Java. This research used the ethnographic method through observation involving both families. The results showed that knowledge of the competence and cognition ability of the baby became the background for caregivers to adjust themselves so as to create an asymmetrical position. This places the caregiver as the party who "dominates" the interaction. In interaction, elements of caregiver contribution can be done by providing verbal stimuli to the baby, giving verbal responses to the baby's behavior, imitating the baby's behavior, shedding, role-playing as a baby, and inviting the baby to do simple games. Meanwhile, babies contribute to vocalizations and kinesic interactions. This study concluded that various interactions between caregivers and infants in two families in the urban environment of Wonosobo, Central Java are evidence that caregivers include babies in interaction activities. That is, caregivers do not wait for the baby to reach the verbal stage for them to start interacting verbally with the baby.
... This aligns with work showing that questions, particularly open-ended wh-questions, are helpful for language learning for toddlers in areas such as verb learning and wh-question acquisition (e.g., Hoff-Ginsberg, 1986;Rowland et al., 2003;Valian and Casey, 2003). Beyond maternal language, fathers have been found to ask more wh-questions than mothers (Gleason, 1975;Tomasello et al., 1990;Rowe et al., 2004), with work showing that fathers' wh-questions stimulated toddler (2-year-olds) responses with a longer mean length of utterance (MLU) than other types of questions (Rowe et al., 2017). Overall, wh-questions can motivate an extended conversation, providing the opportunity for increased language input and fostering verbal reasoning. ...
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Children museums provide an engaging learning environment for families with exhibits designed to stimulate caregiver-child interactions. Specific types of questions have been shown to support child language learning by scaffolding more elaborative responses. This study analyzed the use of question form types during caregiver-child interactions in a children’s museum, aiming to discern their correlation with child language proficiency. We examined and transcribed two exhibit explorations by 43 caregiver-child dyads (3- to 6-year-old children). Our analysis encompasses various syntactic question types (e.g., yes-no, wh-) and measures of child language proficiency, including lexical diversity, morphosyntactic complexity, and overall language ability. Findings reveal disparities in question form usage among caregivers and children, with caregivers predominantly employing closed questions and children balancing closed and open-ended types. Children of caregivers who predominantly posed closed questions exhibited shorter utterances and lower overall language scores. Details on other question forms are presented (sub-types of polar, wh-, alternative, and echo). These findings contribute to our understanding of how question form influences language development and caregiver–child interactions.
... However, there have been some debates on whether CDS differs depending on the gender and age of the speaker, their relationship to the child and their role in the child's life. For example, multiple studies have pointed out differences between mothers' and fathers' CDS (Gleason, 1975;Leaper et al. 1998;Pancsofar & Vernon-Feagans 2006;Hill 2009;VanDam & De Palma 2014). A study by VanDam and De Palma (2014) shows that mothers use higher pitch and vary their pitch more when interacting with their child than with adults, while the fathers talk to their children using intonation patterns more like when they talked to other adults. ...
Conference Paper
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When addressing young children, caregivers typically use a simplified mode of the language — ‘child-directed speech’ (CDS). The most studied domains of CDS are the lexicon, phonetics and phonology, and syntax (Snow 1995). Relatively less is known about the morphological properties of CDS. In this study, we ask how caregivers morphologically simplify their CDS in Inuktitut — an Inuit language with polysynthetic agglutinative structure. We also ask whether such simplification is fine-tuned in accordance with the children’s stage of linguistic development. Our findings show that the morphological complexity (e.g., the number of verb root types and noun root types; use of structures where the word class changes within a word) and lexical diversity of CDS progress as the children advance through the stages of linguistic development. This research contributes to answering the questions about the nature and role of input in the language acquisition process by supporting and adding to the earlier findings in which caregivers adjusted the complexity of their CDS (i.e., Snow & Fergusson 1977), presumably, to ease communication by simplifying the morphology to the comprehension level of their children and to help facilitate their acquisition. Keywords: child-directed speech (CDS), Inuktitut, morphological simplification, morphological complexity
... Alternatively, socio-cultural norms and expectations regarding gendered parenting styles (Yaffe, 2020) might play a role in shaping mothers' IDS and leading it to be more exaggerated, perhaps as a vehicle to convey affect (Benders, 2013). It is also possible that fathers are more restrained in their IDS to make the home and other communicative environments alike, in line with the father-bridge hypothesis, which suggest that fathers are providing communicative challenges for their children as a preparation for the "outside world" (Gleason, 1975). Contrary to our predictions, fathers' 'burst-of-energy' interaction style (Benders et al., 2021;Feldman, 2003) was not reflected by significant interactions between the register and the parents' gender for the measures of pitch range (within phrases) and pitch change (between phrases); unexpectedly, the between-register effect sizes for these measures were larger in mothers (in line with Fernald et al., 1989). ...
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Previous research on infant-directed speech (IDS) and its role in infants’ language development has largely focused on mothers, with fathers being investigated scarcely. Here we examine the acoustics of IDS as compared to adult-directed speech (ADS) in Norwegian mothers and fathers to 8-month-old infants, and whether these relate to direct (eye-tracking) and indirect (parental report) measures of infants’ word comprehension. Forty-five parent-infant dyads participated in the study. Parents (24 mothers, 21 fathers) were recorded reading a picture book to their infant (IDS), and to an experimenter (ADS), ensuring identical linguistic context across speakers and registers. Results showed that both mothers’ and fathers’ IDS had exaggerated prosody, expanded vowel spaces, as well as more variable and less distinct vowels. We found no evidence that acoustic features of parents’ speech were associated with infants’ word comprehension. Potential reasons for the lack of such a relationship are discussed.
... Fathers' high rate of scientific wh-questions adds to previous findings that fathers tend to challenge children to converse and reason beyond their current ability level (Gleason, 1975). However, when looking more closely at the likelihood of a child response, fathers' and mothers' wh-questions were equally likely to elicit children's scientific discourse. ...
Article
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Parents’ questions are an effective strategy for fostering the development of young children’s science understanding and discourse. However, this work has not yet distinguished whether the frequency of questions about scientific content differs between mothers and fathers, despite some evidence from other contexts (i.e., book reading) showing that fathers ask more questions than mothers. The current study compared fathers’ and mothers’ questions to their four- to six-year-old children (N = 49) while interacting with scientific stimuli at a museum research exhibit. Results indicated that fathers asked significantly more questions than mothers, and fathers’ questions were more strongly related to children’s scientific discourse. Results are discussed in terms of the importance of adult questions for the development of children’s scientific understanding as well as broadening research to include interlocutors other than mothers.
... More specifically, fathers have been suggested to use more 'cognitively challenging' talk: they are thought to employ more diverse vocabulary and ask more questions that require children to think beyond the literal text (Cutler and Palkovitz, 2020;Duursma, 2016). Two reasons have been proposed for this 'differential experience' (Bernstein-Ratner, 1988;Gleason, 1975;Korat et al., 2008;Rowe et al., 2004). On the one hand, it might be that because fathers generally engage in fewer shared activities with their children than mothers do, they might be less attuned to their children's language level: while mothers adjust their interactions to their children's emerging competence, fathers' relative inexperience is hypothesized to make them use (too) complex talk. ...
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Although research on the home literacy environment and its impact on early literacy has long focused on mothers, the past decade has seen a shift in scholarly attention to the role of fathers. Building on this shift, we examined whether the nature of parent–child interactions during shared storybook reading varies with parent gender, child gender and the interaction between the two, and we analysed whether possible differences in the nature of mother– and father–child interactions are related to story comprehension. We made video observations of mothers and fathers within 36 relatively highly educated families reading a storybook with their kindergartener (age 4 – 5) and registered the use of cognitively challenging (i.e. decontextualized) talk during these activities. After each shared reading session, we additionally administered a test assessing children’s understanding of the story being read. Two-way mixed ANOVA’s revealed no effects of parent gender or child gender on either the use of cognitively challenging talk or children’s story comprehension, nor did we find interaction effects of parent and child gender. The extent of cognitively challenging talk was significantly correlated to children’s comprehension scores for fathers, but not for mothers. This correlation seems to have masked another association, however: when correlations were computed separately for girls and boys, we found that the proportion of cognitively challenging utterances of both parents was correlated to comprehension scores for boys, but not for girls. The absence of parent gender effects provides further insights into the way mothers and fathers shape interactions during shared reading, but also stresses the need for studies with larger, more diverse samples. The observation that more frequent use of cognitively challenging talk was paralleled by better story comprehension for boys invites further research on the specific effects of shared reading for boys.
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This case study explores the bilingual upbringing of a 5 year 2 months old child in Turkish and English through “non-native parents (NNP) strategy” within a context where English is neither the first nor the majority language of the community. Drawing on the Parental Discourse Hypothesis (Lanza, 1992) and Modeling Hypothesis (Comeau et al., 2003), the researchers examined not only the development of the child’s English, but also the approach of the father towards the child, and his self-perception as a father seeking opportunities to raise a bilingual child. The data were collected by means of a series of video recordings of the interaction between the child and the father, as well as via two semi-structured interviews with the father. The findings show that even quite limited exposure to a (second) language may lead to the acquisition of that language thanks to strict adherence to NNP strategy, and the parents’ concentrated efforts at refraining from code-mixing in their own speech.
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The ability to repair breakdowns in communication is a critical pragmatic language skill. To date however, studies of repairs have been conducted with mothers or examiners. Little is known about repairs children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) use in interactions with fathers. Expanding our understanding of communication repairs used with fathers, and how these compare with mothers, may have clinical implications for improving social communication skills for children with ASD. This descriptive study investigated communication breakdowns and repairs of 16 children with ASD and fathers and mothers, during unscripted 15-min parent-child play sessions. Analysis of breakdowns and repairs was compared across parent gender. Findings provide early evidence of differences in breakdowns experienced and communication repairs used by children with ASD in interactions with their mothers and fathers. In parent-child free-play interactions, children with ASD had significantly fewer initiations, more breakdowns, and lower rates of repairs, with fathers than with mothers. Results suggest that including fathers in parent coaching aimed at increasing initiations, reducing breakdowns, and enhancing repair strategies may be a valuable component of parent-implemented social communication interventions for children with ASD.
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