Motherhood can be a thankless task, so moms around the world let out a collective “?!!?” when new research from anthropologists at Fudan University in Shanghai, China suggested that children acquire most of their vocabulary from their fathers.
But like most studies, this one showed something much more complex that didn’t come across in the news headlines. In fact, kids get their language skills from both parents; they just tend to learn different things from each parent.
The best way to explain the findings is this: a child is more likely to learn its lexical skills (that is, vocabulary) from its father and its phonemic abilities (that it, sounds and pronunciation) from its mother.
That might still seem like a raw deal, but phonemes are what make up words and help children distinguish their “s” from their “m” sounds, for example. Without phonemes, there is no language.
Picture a mother trying to teach her child to say “moon.” She mimics the “mmmm” and the “oooo” sounds and her baby attempts to make the same noises.
These pronunciation skills are the building blocks of words and encourage children to be vocal and try to say things in the first place. That way, when new words come along, kids already have the ability to mimic the sounds that make them up.
Of course, this research wasn’t done to prove anything about the importance of one parent over the other. And there are plenty of kids whose dads aren’t there to teach them vocabulary and who learn all of their language skills from their mothers, or vice versa.
What’s interesting about the new research is that it actually contradicts what we had always assumed about how babies acquire language. Have you heard the phrase “mother tongue”? This comes from an earlier theory that all language skills came from mothers.
This theory was challenged by Swiss researchers in 1997. Their study combined linguistics and genetics to create a “Father Tongue Hypothesis” which suggested that genes that influence general language ability were found on the Y chromosome, which is passed on from the father.
Mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on from mothers, did not contain this genetic information. Of course, now we know that language is much more complication than just one gene.
The new Chinese research was designed to add another layer to the mother/father tongue debate.
The Chinese researchers also used a combination of linguistic and genetic analysis that looked at the male Y chromosome and female mitochondrial DNA.
But instead of just looking for a “language gene,” they took a more subtle approach, looking at vocabulary and phonemic systems separately in the 34 populations they studied. That’s when they noticed that the male chromosome didn’t account for all language, but rather just vocabulary, while female DNA was associated with phoneme acquisition.
So, in essence, the new research unites the mother tongue and father tongue hypotheses, showing that both parents play a role in the children learning to speak.
One of the most important things to note about any study is whether or not the results suggest a correlation between two things (genetic markers and language abilities, in this case) or an actual causal relationship.
This study shows a correlation, which means that it could all be a coincidence. We’ll have to wait for more research to be done to show that there’s a causal link.
So while fathers would do well to watch their language around their kids, there’s no reason to change your parenting approach just because of one study.
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