Blog Summary 9: Twins and Language

Since our student, Ryan Magee, did not publish his post, please find below Blog Summary 9 from my other section. Responses are due on Friday, Feb. 13th, at class time.
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There is a pervasive assumption in the twin and language development literature that twins are somewhat delayed in language development and more prone to language disabilities.

In the assigned article, the author summarizes several different case studies performed with the intention of discerning whether or not there was a language delay in twins. One early study in particular found that twins usually either spoke in shorter sentences or not very much at all compared to a person of single birth.
There was also a slight difference in a twin's vocabulary than that of a singleton.

Also it was not just biological factors, low birth weight and birth order, that separated the twin case studies but that of maternal speech to the child that added into the resulting language delays. So both biological and environmental factors effect the speech of twins. Even with these factors, most twins don't suffer from any sort of language impairment once they've reached early childhood.

The author does state however that there are several flaws in these case studies. One study described that the researchers did not find it necessary to separate the twins with actual learning impairments from the other twins which lowered the overall results of the study. The researchers also did not record birth weight and birth order of the twins, which has been learned to factor in to language delay. The twins also were not observed independently from one another which might have skewed the results as well.
Most research though has come to the conclusion that it is not biological but social factors that leads twins to having more of a language delay than singletons. They believe this is because as a twin you tend to receive less direct parental speech.

The article also concludes with the idea that the more older siblings you have, the lower your IQ. The general sibling situation states that the lower a child's birth position the lower his or her IQ will be. Even more so when it comes to twins because having a twin is the most extreme case possible of having a sibling.

I felt that the article showed so much fault in the studies that I could not really believe in the results. And since the author said no language delays exist after early childhood, that it really is not fair to single out twins as having language development issues.

by: Danielle McCarty