Families' mealtime talk has significant implications for children's language development. This study investigated five middle-class Australian Chinese families that differ in their lifestyles and meal routines. It aims to explore: (1) the nature of the Chinese parents' language use in interactions with children at mealtime; and (2) the factors…

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of age and family socioeconomic status (SES) on the evaluative language performance of Mandarin-Chinese-speaking young children and their mothers. The participants were 65 mother-child dyads recruited in Taiwan. Thirty-four of these dyads were from middle-class families and 31 were from…

Background: Little empirical research examines relations among the quality of both mothers' and fathers' social emotional and linguistic support of toddlers across multiple parent-child interaction contexts. Objective: The current study investigated the influence of parent gender (mother vs. father) and activity setting (structured task vs. free…

Family dinnertime conversations are key settings where children learn behavior regulation, narrative skills, and knowledge about the world. In this context, parents may also model and socialize gender differences in language. The present study quantitatively examines gendered language use across a family dinnertime recorded with 37 broadly…

Discusses the movement toward androgyny based upon and fostered by an increasing societal emphasis upon "femininity" in its maternal (as opposed to its heterosexual) aspects. Argues that the masculine paradigm promotes differentiation between the sexes, especially the sex objectification of women. (Author/RK)

Any theory of language acquisition must take into account the actual speech heard by children during the acquisition period. When 8 well-educated mothers were tape-recorded talking to their daughters, ages 16 to 30 months, it was found that their speech differed significantly from that spoken to another adult. The mothers used a more restricted…

An investigation was conducted of socioeconomic differences in the cognitive style and content of mother/child interaction, through the use of a task in which mothers attempted to get their children to point to the target item in an array of four pictures. Subjects were 32 mother/child dyads, half black and half white. Within each ethnic group,…

A study relating mothers' language styles and techniques of family control to children's cognitive development was conducted with 163 urban Negro mothers from the lower and middle classes and their 4-year-old children. The following conclusions were drawn: (1) There was a significant negative correlation between responses of status-oriented…