Parent–child interaction and the acquisition of lexical information during play

Individual play interactions of parents with their preschool-aged boys and girls were examined to determine the ways mothers and fathers provided and elicited lexical information about the names and functions of the parts of a complex toy car. Parents' and children's speech was analyzed for utterances that provided or requested the name (label) or purpose (function) of a car part and for nonlabeling utterances that mentioned the part (term). Analyses revealed significant contrasts between fathers and mothers in their interactive styles and in the amounts and kinds of lexical information they provided and elicited. Fathers' speech contained more different terms than did mothers', and more fathers than mothers described the functions of the car parts. Fathers were also more cognitively and linguistically demanding: More fathers than mothers requested labels and functions from their children. Children, in turn, produced more total vocabulary to fathers than to mothers. These parent-child interaction patterns suggest that fathers as well as mothers may exert an active influence on children's language development. The influence of parent-child interaction styles on young children's language and cognitive development has increasingly become a focus of research attention (ClarkeStewart, 1978; Gleason & Weintraub, 1978). After first establishing that mothers provide special modifications in their speech to young children (Snow, 1977), a number of researchers have attempted to distinguish those features of mothers' speech that may advance children's language acquisition. For example, Newport, Gleitman, and Gleitman (1977) found a statistically significant positive relationship between the frequency of maternal labeling utterances (e.g., "That's an apple") and the size of children's vocabularies.