In families with two working parents, fathers may have more impact ____1____ a child’s language development than mothers, a new study ____2____. Researchers ____3____ 92 families from 11 child care centers before their children were a year old, interviewing each to establish income, ____4____ of education and child care arrangements. ____5____, it was a group of well-educated middle-class families, ____6____ married parents both living in the home. When the children were 2, researchers videotaped them at home in free-play sessions with both parents, recording all of their ____7____. The study will appear in the November ____8____ of The Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. The scientists ____9____ the total number of utterances of the parents, the number of different words they used, the ____10____ of their sentences and other aspects of their speech. ____11____ average, fathers spoke less than mothers did, but they did not ____12____ in the length of utterances or proportion of questions asked. Finally, the researchers ____13____ the children’s speech at age 3, using a standardized language test. The only predictors of high ____14____ on the test were the mother’s level of education, the ____15____ of child care and the number of different words the father used. The researchers are ____16____ why the father’s speech, and not the mother’s, had an effect. “It’s well ____17____ that the mother’s language does have an impact,” said Nadya Pancsofar, the lead author of the study. “It ____18____ be that the high-functioning mothers in the study had already had a strong infl uence ____19____ their children’s speech development, or it may be that mothers are ____20____ in a way we didn’t measure in the study.”