Children who have an older brother take longer to start talking, according to a study

The logical thing is to think that a child who has older siblings will grow up in a stimulating linguistic environment and develop their language skills faster than the first child in the family.

Well it seems that it is not so, but quite the opposite. A study of the National Center for Scientific Research of France (CNRS) has just specified that The child who has an older brother later develops his language skills. Of course, only in the case that the eldest is a boy, because it does not happen if he is a girl.

If the eldest is a girl, it does not influence the language

The study 'The effect of older siblings on language development based on age and sex difference' has been published in the journal Psychological Science.

The authors explain that several investigations have shown that language acquisition in a child with an older brother would be slower than in a child without an older child.

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The new French study is more surprising, as it has shown that only older siblings would have an impact on the linguistic abilities of their younger siblings.

These are the conclusions of studying more than 1,000 children from birth to five and a half years of age. Their language skills were evaluated at 2, 3 and 5.5 years by tests that measured various aspects of language, such as vocabulary, syntax and verbal reasoning.

Children with older siblings were on average 2 months behind in their language development compared to other children with older sisters.

For scientists, there are two hypotheses that could explain this result:

  • Older sisters, speaking more easily with their younger siblings than siblings, would compensate for the lower availability of parents.

  • Older sisters are less likely to compete for parental attention than older siblings.

The more older siblings, the less language skills

The number of older siblings a child has is negatively correlated with the child's verbal abilities, perhaps due to competition for parental attention.

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Contrary to predictions, the results showed that the sibling age gap was not associated with language skills and did not interact with sex.

The results suggest that the negative effect of older siblings on language development may be entirely due to the role of male siblings.

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