4. Father's Impact on a Child's Language Development 父亲对孩子语言发展的影响

4. Father's Impact on a Child's Language Development 父亲对孩子语言发展的影响

①Im families with two working parents,father may have more impact on a child's language development than mothers,a new study suggests.


②Researchers recruited 92 families from 11 child care centers before their children were a year old,interviewing each to establish income,level of education and child care arrangements.Overall,It was a group of well-educated middle-class families,with married parents both living in the home.

③when the children were 2,researches videotaped them at home in free-play sessions with both parents,recording all of their speech.The study will appear in the November issue of The Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.

④The scientists measured the total number of utterance of the parents,the number of different words they used ,the complexity of their sentences and other aspects of their speech.On average,fathers spoke less than mothers did,but they not differ in the length of utterances or proportion of questions asked.

⑤Finally，the researches analyzed the children speech’s at age 3，using a standard language test.The only predictors of high scores on the test were the mother’s level of education,the quality of child care and the number of different words the father used.

⑥The researchers are unsure why the father’s speech，and not the mother’s,had an effect.

⑦"It’s well established that the mother’s language does have an impact,"said Nadya Pancsofar，the lead author of the study.It could be that the high-functioning mothers in the study had already had a strong influence on their children’s speech development，Ms Pancsofar said,"or it may be that mothers are contributing in a way we didn’t measure in the study."