Sex Differences in Parental Influences on Children's Story-Telling Skills

Acquisition of story-telling skills is an aspect of language development that is influenced by hearing parental story telling. Because discourse between parent and child is affected by the sex of both parent and child, we hypothesized that sex differences would affect parental story telling and children's acquisition of story-telling skills. For this study, 24 children (12 girls, 12 boys) told a story from a picture book both before and after hearing a parent (12 mothers or 12 fathers) tell the story. Children's stories improved after hearing a parent tell the story. Sons told stories containing more evaluatives (linguistic forms believed to promote better comprehension and memory of stories) after hearing mother's rather than father's story telling, and daughters told stories containing more evaluatives after hearing father's, rather than mother's, story telling. There were no differences in mothers' and fathers' use of evaluatives when telling stories to sons as compared with daughters.