In families with two working parents, father may have more ___1___ on a child’ s language development than mothers, a new study suggests. Researchers ___2___ 92 families from 11 child care centers before their children were a year old, interviewing each to establish income, level of education and child care arrangements. Overall, it was a group of well-educated middle-class families, with 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 speech. The study will appear in the November issue of The Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. The scientists measured the total number of utterances of the parents, the number of different words they used, the complexity of their sentences and other aspects of their speech. On average, fathers spoke less than mothers did, but they not differ in the length of utterances or proportion of questions asked. Finally , the researchers ___3___ the children speech’s at age 3, using a standardized language test. The only predictors of high scores on the test were the mother’s level of education, the quality of child care and the number of different words the father used. The researchers are unsure why the father’s speech , and not the mother’s, had an effect. "It’ s well ___4___ that the mother’s language does have an impact," said Nadya Pancsofar , the lead author of the study. It could be that the high-functioning mothers in the study had already had a strong influence on their children’ s speech development , Ms Pancsofar said," or it may be that mothers are ___5___ in a way we didn’t measure in the study."