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Patterns of parental vocabulary selection in speech to very young children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Nan Bernstein Ratner
Nan Bernstein Ratner*
Affiliation:
The University of Maryland at College Park
*
Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, The University of Maryland at College Park, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
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Abstract

Previous studies have suggested that paternal vocabulary selection in speech to young children may be more diverse or demanding than that of mothers. This study examined the speech of eight mothers and eight fathers to their young language learning children. Nominal usage was subjected to TTR and frequency-of-occurrence analyses. In general, while paternal speech does not appear to be more diverse than maternal speech, it does appear to be characterized by greater usage of rare vocabulary and significantly lower usage of common vocabulary than is maternal speech.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , October 1988 , pp. 481 - 492
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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Footnotes

*

The author wishes to thank Valerie Andrews and Janice Corazza for their assistance with this project, as well as the parents who donated their time to this undertaking. Computer facilities for the project were provided by the University of Maryland Computer Science Center.

References

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