Gender difference in Child-Directed Speech

By Aimee Horne

 

Remember how your parents used to talk to you when you were younger? Do you remember the differences between the way your mum and dad would speak to you? No? Well, maybe I can reveal to you how they most likely spoke.

Child-directed speech is the way that adults speak to a young child. Think back to when you last spoke to a child, did you use words such as doggie and speak in high pitched voice? Most of us do it but do we speak in different ways to children based on our gender? Research in the late 1980s to 1990s suggests that there is a distinction between mother's and father's speech. Jean Berko Gleason proposed the bridge hypothesis (nothing to do with actual bridges) that stated that the secondary parent, the parent that spends the least time with the child, speaks to them in a more complex manner to help develop their speech. The father, with exceptions, tends to be the secondary parent and the mother the primary as she looks after the child which would imply that mothers and fathers speak differently. Research found that generally fathers ask more wh- questions. Why this, why that, where to, what's this? How tedious. Unlike dads, mothers use more scaffolding. Like scaffolding on building sites, scaffolding in speaking means to set the structure for how someone should reply. So your mum might say, "Is this a cat?" whereas your dad might say, "What is this?"

Research also found that when a mum and dad are together with their child, the mother would be the one that speaks more. No surprise there. My mum would be the prime evidence to support this argument. This research said that mother speaks more in frequency and for length of time. We all know how our mums can babble on about nonsense for what seems like forever.

Leaper, Anderson & Sanders are another set of linguists that looked into CDS (Child-Directed Language.) They found that men tend to be more direct with their negative speech. If you don't know what negative speech is, don't you worry here is your explanation: negative speech is what said linguists described as, "criticism, disapproval and disagreement." So basically men are ruder than women. They said it not me. I'm kidding. What they really meant was that men are more likely to say, "No that's not right" than women, who are more likely to say "Why don't we try a different way?" So if you've heard that from your mum before you know you've done whatever you were doing wrong.

As I said at the beginning of this blog, before I started to ramble on about how your mum and dad supposedly spoke to you when you were younger, all the research I have brought up here is from way way way back in the past. Well, 1980s. In the terms of research that is old. So it could be argued that this is all out of date as women have been empowered and go to work so may become the secondary parent and that throws everything up in the air. I guess it's up to you to decide whether you agree mums and dads still speak differently.