Abstract
There has been little research on the contributions of paternal language to their young children. Particularly father education may influence the quantity and the quality of father-child interactions (Pancsofar & Vernon-Feagans, 2010). Focusing on the link between fathers’ socioeconomic status (SES) and their language input, this research aims to investigate how fathers’ SES influences their utterance complexity in the toy play context with their young children. Ten fathers differing in SES and their preschoolers were taped in their homes for about 15 minutes and fathers were asked to help their child during the toy play sessions. Research on fathers, though limited (Cabrera et al., 2007) has shown that father education is positively associated with children’s language development. Since very few studies have considered the possible contributions of paternal language to children’s early language development, this study examines the father-child dialogues and focuses on both fathers’ and their children’s language use. In this respect, this cross-sectional study tries to explore the father-child interactional patterns in terms of both fathers’ and their children’s utterance complexity, and reveal to what extent the linguistic contributions of fathers differentiate depending on their SES. The results indicate that SES has an important role in language use; that is, the utterances of high SES fathers and children are more complex and longer than their low SES counterparts.
Highlights
Language develops in the context of social relations and has its roots in the early interactions between childrenHow to cite this paper: Cengiz, Ö. (2016)
Parent-child language interactions have been considered an important context of early language development, too few studies have examined fathers’ language input (Pancsofar & Vernon-Feagans, 2006)
Almost all research on parent-child interactions has focused on mothers, not fathers
Summary
Language develops in the context of social relations and has its roots in the early interactions between childrenHow to cite this paper: Cengiz, Ö. (2016). Language develops in the context of social relations and has its roots in the early interactions between children. Cengiz and their parents (Bruner, 1981; Tomasello, 1992). Parent-child language interactions have been considered an important context of early language development, too few studies have examined fathers’ language input (Pancsofar & Vernon-Feagans, 2006). As has been found in research on mother education (Hoff, 2006), father education may make important contributions to child language development. Over the last few decades there has been growing interest in research on fathers, and studies have shown that fathers’ engagement with their children is related to children’s language, literacy and cognitive skills (Tamis-LeMonda, Shannon, Cabrera, & Lamb, 2004; Duursma, Pan, & Raikes, 2008)
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