General Concepts

Gender-Specific CDS: the Basics

Some research suggests that fathers use more advanced vocabulary, produce more directives and imperatives, and generally elicit more speech from the child. However, inconsistencies between studies suggest that other factors may play into determining these behaviors.

But some trends do hold up. Generally, fathers produce more requests for clarification and Wh-questions, whereas mothers employ more scaffolding. Wh-questions constitute a greater linguistic challenge to the child because they require the child to construct a lexical response rather than repeat the parent's structure or simply give a non-verbal response. Mothers tend to be more talkative in general, both in the length and frequency of utterances. This difference is most pronounced in whole-family contexts.

These tendencies was first identified by Jean Berko Gleason (1975) as the Bridge Hypothesis, which has since been the dominant theory in the area of gender-specific CDS. It states that secondary parents use more complex language to challenge children and help them develop linguistic skills useful in distanced communication such as talking to strangers, discussing abstract concepts, and reading.

Does it hold up? The Bridge Hypothesis resulted from Gleason's observations of white middle-class families in which primary and secondary caregiver roles were clearly defined. There are two important factors to consider: the amount of time a child spends with one parent versus the other, and the developmental stage of the child at a given point in life. It is clear that fathers' and mothers' speech is more similar the more balanced the time spent with the child. It also seems that, as children develop and need less assistance, the gap in complexity narrows.

Below are two studies that address general aspects of the topics just discussed. For a few variable-specific studies, see the Other Studies page.

Davidson and Snow (1996)

A study of both dyadic and whole-family interactions in twelve white, suburban, middle-class families. Both parents were in the workforce and were college-educated, most having Master's or Doctoral degrees.

Procedure

Parents were provided with a tape recorder and asked to record interactions in mother-child, father-child, and family meal scenarios. Parents were free to choose the activity, which included ritualized activities such as board and card and games, constructive activities such as toy play and arts and crafts, and mundane tasks such as cleaning, dressing, and writing thank-you notes.

16 minutes of each interaction were coded using CHILDES with respect to

verbosity

total number of utterances

total number of words

MLU

total number of turns

complexity

ratio of verbs per turn

proportion of cognitive psychological verbs

number of subordinate clauses

number of topic initiations

Conversational episodes were also categorized according to topic level.

Results

Mothers consistently talked more than fathers (sometimes even twice as much) in every respect, most significantly in dyadic MLT. This was contrary to the expectation that fathers would be more active. Mothers also used more difficult vocabulary items and more complex speech. Whole-family conversation made these differences even more pronounced yielded more questions from mothers.

in whole-family situations, mothers initiated topics more often than fathers. As expected, mothers initiated Immediate topics more frequently than fathers. However, there was little difference in initiation of Knowledge topics.

Children did not return speech in the same manner. Their speech was most voluble and complex in the father-child dyad. On the other hand, children produced more enquiries and higher-level questions in the mother-child dyad.

Conclusions

The authors note that, while complexity was greater in mothers, this does not devalue the complexity of fathers' speech. The study involved highly-educated families in which both parents produced highly sophisticated input.

This study largely conflicts with the Bridge Hypothesis. Because only five-year-olds were studied, it is difficult to ascertain whether the fathers had played more challenging roles earlier in their child's development, or whether mothers consistently fulfilled this role.

Ratner (1988)

A study of eight families with children ranging from one-and-a-half to two months old and having vocabularies of 15-100 words. Parents were recruited within a university community and were speakers of standard American English. The authors cite a lack of research on fathers' speech to language-learners.

Procedure

Parent-child dyads were videotaped in 45-minute sessions, playing with an unfamiliar but wide variety of toys. Their conversations were transcribed and analyzed in reference to a word frequency table devised by Carroll, et al. (1971).

Results

Fathers produced more low-frequency nouns, and mother produced more ultra-high-frequency nouns. Results for a middle category, high frequency nouns, were mixed; the mean of all dyads showed essentially identical usage for both genders.

Several of the measured differences were insignificant. Fathers exhibited slightly more diverse word selection, and mothers tended to repeat words more than fathers. There was also a slight tendency for parents to use more low-frequency nouns when addressing boys.

Conclusion

Fathers used more challenging vocabulary, showing support for the Bridge Hypothesis. Also, fathers and mothers exhibited complementary vocabularies, perhaps suggesting even more clearly-defined communicative roles than Gleason indicates. The extent to which parental diction plays a role in language acquisition is unclear, but there is no question that broad lexical exposure improves the child's ability to recall labels and morphosyntactic conventions.

This site was last updated 03/18/05

Content and site design by Adam Berey, 2005.