Quantity of mothers' and fathers' speech to sons and daughters

Abstract

The literature on child-directed speech has shown that mothers, on average, talk to their children with higher token frequency than fathers, but fathers may use more complex language or more variable word types. Other recent research has shown that mothers may use greater fundamental frequency variability and range when talking to their children, as compared with fathers who showed no fundamental frequency differences between child- and adult-directed speech. There is also some evidence that mothers may talk more often with their daughters than sons. Whether fathers are sensitive to the sex of their children is unknown. This work looks at the quantity of fathers' and mothers' speech to their sons and daughters from a large database of daylong recordings collected from a body-worn recorder on preschool boys and girls in their natural daily environments. The recordings were analyzed offline with automatic speech processing software which tallied the quantity of syllables produced for all individual talkers and the conversational exchanges among mothers and fathers with their sons and daughters. Contrary to previous findings, results indicate that fathers may engage more often with their sons than daughters, but mothers are not sensitive to child sex.