Read an abstract of “Mother and Father Language Input to Young Children: Contributions to Later Language Development,” posted by Science Direct.
A father’s language skills may have a greater impact on a child’s language development than the mother’s speech does, a study suggests.
The research, which appears in the November-December issue of the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, examined differences in the way mothers and fathers spoke to their 24-month-old children. Follow-up studies showed that at 36 months of age, the number of different words that the fathers had used was a predictor of greater language development in the children, according to the study, conducted by two school of education researchers, Nadya Pancsofar and Lynne Vernon-Feagans, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
