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Parental Speech and Gesture Input to Girls Versus Boys in Singletons and Twins

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Abstract

Children show sex differences in early speech development, with girls producing a greater number and variety of words at an earlier age than boys (Berglund et al. in Scand J Psychol 46(6): 485–491, 2005)—a pattern that also becomes evident in gesture (Butterworth and Morisette in J Reprod Infant Psychol 14(3): 219–231, 1996). Importantly, parents show variability in how they produce speech when interacting with their singleton sons vs. daughters (i.e., Cherry and Lewis in Dev Psychol 12: 278–282, 1976; Leaper et al. in Dev Psychol 34: 3–27, 1998). However, it is unknown whether the variability in speech input extends to different twin dyads or becomes evident in gesture input. In this study, we examined parental gesture and speech input to 35 singleton (19 boys, 16 girls) and 62 twin (10 boy–boy, 9 girl–girl, and 12 girl–boy dyads) Turkish children (age range = 0;10–3;4) in parent–child interactions. We asked whether there is evidence of sex (girls vs. boys) or group (singletons vs. twins) differences in parents’ speech and gesture production, and whether these differences also become evident in different twin dyads (girl–girl, boy–boy, girl–boy). Our results, based on parent-child interactions, largely showed no evidence of sex or dyad-composition difference in either parent speech or gesture, but evidence of a group difference in gesture, with the parents of singletons providing a greater amount, diversity, and complexity of gestures than parents of twins in their interactions. These results suggest that differences in parent input to singletons vs. twins might become evident initially in gesture.

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Notes

  1. In the recordings where both mother and father were present, they took turns while interacting with their children; we therefore included input across the two parents. The co-presence of mother and father during the interaction was equally distributed across all 5 groups, with n = 1 per group.

  2. The age of the grandmother was not recorded.

  3. The mean length of interaction varied by group, Msingletons = 10.06 (SD = 4.31) vs. Mtwins = 14.32 (SD = 4.65), F(1, 64) = 14.95, p < .001, but not by sex, Mgirls = 12.40 (SD = 5.65) vs. Mboys = 10.97 (SD = 4.31), F(1, 52) = 1.12, p = .29, or by twin dyad type, Mtwin boy–boy = 13.40 (SD = 3.41), Mtwin girl–girl = 15.78 (SD = 6.16), Mtwin boy- girl = 14.00 (SD = 4.39), F(2, 28) = 0.65, p = .53.

  4. For the 5 parent-child interactions where both parents were present, we tabulated speech production across the two parents.

  5. For the 5 parent-child interactions where both parents were present, we tabulated gesture production across the two parents.

  6. We conducted all analyses first with the whole sample, and then with a reduced sample by excluding the 5 parent-child interactions (n = 1/group) in which both parents were present. The pattern of results remained identical; we therefore only reported the results based on the whole sample.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the helpful comments provided by the reviewers and the editor, Dr. Boone, on an earlier version of the manuscript. We also thank Melis Çiftçi and Fatih Şahinkayası for their help with data transcription and coding, along with the families for their participation in our study. The data collection for the project was funded by a Grant to N.K. (Ketrez-Sözmen, Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, 111K270).

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  1. Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, 30303, USA

    Ebru Pınar, Sumeyra Ozturk & Şeyda Özçalışkan

  2. Department of English Language Teacher Education, İstanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey

    F. Nihan Ketrez

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  1. Ebru Pınar
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Table 4 Correlational matrix for parents’ speech and gesture production (significant correlations are in bold)
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Pınar, E., Ozturk, S., Ketrez, F.N. et al. Parental Speech and Gesture Input to Girls Versus Boys in Singletons and Twins. J Nonverbal Behav 45, 297–318 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-020-00356-w

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