Purpose:
Fathers play a critical but underresearched role in their children’s
cognitive and linguistic development. Focusing on two-parent families with a
mother and a father, the present longitudinal study explores the amount of
paternal input infants hear during the first 2 years of life, how this input
changes over time, and how it relates to child volubility. We devote special
attention to parentese, a near-universal style of infant-directed speech,
distinguished by its higher pitch, slower tempo, and exaggerated intonation.
