Fathers, siblings, and the bridge hypothesis

The underlying assumption of the Bridge Hypothesis-which is not shared by all developmental psycholinguists-is that communication pressure is beneficial to the child’s development of communicative competence, including the acquisition of linguistic skills. This chapter reviews the existing research on fathers’ and siblings’ linguistic interactions with young children, including some recent research from our own laboratory. In the traditional family situation, fathers spend significantly less time than mothers interacting with their children, and so presumably are less familiar with the everyday behavioral routines that are so important for early language acquisition. As with fathers, the research on siblings’ communicative interactions with young children has just begun. Most of the relevant research on sibling speech to infants is concerned with structural/linguistic features, and it is thus unclear in this case as well whether siblings do in fact place communication pressure on the language learning child and thereby act as a linguistic bridge.

Duke Scholars

Author Michael Tomasello Psychology & Neuroscience