Fathers: watch what you say. It seems dads may have more of an influence on their children鈥檚 language development than they might think.
Lynne Vernon-Feagans at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and her colleagues sat in on playtime with 92 families with dual incomes, observing how much each parent spoke to their child, the words and sentence structures they used, and the types of questions they asked.
Children whose father鈥檚 vocabulary was more varied when they were 2 years old had more advanced language skills at age 3. Surprisingly, the dads spoke less and asked fewer questions than the mothers, suggesting it was not how much they spoke but what they said and how they said it that resonated with their children.
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The mother鈥檚 vocabulary did not seem to have a significant impact on language development. However, because most of the mothers in the study used a large number of words when talking to their children, there could also be a threshold at which a large vocabulary ceases to be an advantage to the child, says Vernon-Feagans. 鈥淧erhaps when parents鈥� vocabulary falls below such a threshold, as is more likely to occur with fathers in this study, children鈥檚 later expressive language development may be negatively impacted,鈥� she says (Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, DOI: 10.1016/j.appdev.2006.08.003).
