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Fathers' and mothers' speech in early language development*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

J. A. Rondal
J. A. Rondal
Affiliation:
Laval University
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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.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , June 1980 , pp. 353 - 369
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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Footnotes

*

Paper presented at the symposium on ‘Parent–child and sibling interaction’, First International Congress for the Study of Child Language (International Association for the Study of Child Language), Tokyo, August 1978. The research on which the paper is based was supported by the Faculty of Education of the Laval University. Appreciation is expressed to Pierrette Day, Francine Laplante, and to Huguette Gendreaux for serving as research and administrative assistants on the project, to Dr. Daniel Defays of the University of Liège, Belgium, for his assistance in statistical and computer analysis, as well as to the children and their parents for allowing the tape recordings to be made in their homes. Author's address: Dr J. A. Rondal, Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale, Section Psycholinguistique, Université de Liège, 32, Bd. de la Constitution, 4020 Liège, Belgium.

References

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