TITLE:
Turkish Fathers’ Utterance Complexity during the Interaction of Toy Play with Their Preschoolers
AUTHORS:
Özge Cengiz
KEYWORDS:
Paternal Language Input, Father-Child Interactions, Utterance Complexity, Mean Length of Utterance
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
Vol.6 No.2,
April
18,
2016
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.