Child‐Directed Speech Is Infrequent in a Forager‐Farmer Population: A Time Allocation Study

Cristià, Alejandrina; Dupoux, Emmanuel; Gurven, Michael; Stieglitz, Jonathan

doi:10.1111/cdev.12974

Cited by 183 publications

(165 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…In contrast, research quantifying language input across populations with varying demographic, social, and cultural properties may need to be particularly sensitive to cross‐sample comparison (cf. Bergelson et al., in press; Cristia, Dupoux, Gurven, & Stieglitz, ; Shneidman & Goldin‐Meadow, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Day by day, hour by hour: Naturalistic language input to infants

Bergelson

Amatuni

Dailey

et al. 2018

Developmental Science

158

116

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Measurements of infants' quotidian experiences provide critical information about early development. However, the role of sampling methods in providing these measurements is rarely examined. Here we directly compare language input from hour-long video-recordings and daylong audio-recordings within the same group of 44 infants at 6 and 7 months. We compared 12 measures of language quantity and lexical diversity, talker variability, utterance-type, and object presence, finding moderate correlations across recording-types. However, video-recordings generally featured far denser noun input across these measures compared to the daylong audio-recordings, more akin to 'peak' audio hours (though not as high in talkers and word-types). Although audio-recordings captured ~10 times more awake-time than videos, the noun input in them was only 2-4 times greater. Notably, whether we compared videos to daylong audio-recordings or peak audio times, videos featured relatively fewer declaratives and more questions; furthermore, the most common video-recorded nouns were less consistent across families than the top audio-recording nouns were. Thus, hour-long videos and daylong audio-recordings revealed fairly divergent pictures of the language infants hear and learn from in their daily lives. We suggest that short video-recordings provide a dense and somewhat different sample of infants' language experiences, rather than a typical one, and should be used cautiously for extrapolation about common words, talkers, utterance-types, and contexts at larger timescales. If theories of language development are to be held accountable to 'facts on the ground' from observational data, greater care is needed to unpack the ramifications of sampling methods of early language input.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Day by day, hour by hour: Naturalistic language input to infants

Bergelson

Amatuni

Dailey

et al. 2018

Developmental Science

158

116

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“…Instead, language is transmitted from adults to children, and a vast body of research on the nature of childdirected speech (for reviews see Golinkoff, Can, Soderstrom & Hirsh-Pasek, 2015;Saint-Georges, Chetouani, Cassel, Apicella, Mahdhaoui, et al, 2013;Soderstom, 2007) has documented that adults adjust their communication to accommodate children's cognitive and linguistic limitations, although the universality of this adjustment is debated (e.g. Cristia, Dupoux, Gurven & Stieglitz, 2017;Lieven, 1994;Schieffelin & Ochs, 1989). Moreover, not only do adults pre-select the input provided to children in a manner that may aid learning (Ferguson, 1964;Fernald, Taeschner, Dunn, et al, 1989;Eaves, Feldman, Griffiths & Shafto, 2016) but, as Matthews et al (2007) and Experiment 3 of this study suggest, they also provide feedback that teaches children how to monitor the communicative efficiency of their productions.…”

Section: Overcoming Children's Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adults are more efficient in creating and transmitting novel signalling systems than children

Kempe¹,

Gauvrit²,

Gibson³

et al. 2018

Preprint

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children Acknowledgement:We gratefully acknowledge funding of a research visit to the Language and Cognition Group of the Max-Planck-Institute of Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, which supported the writing of this paper, and helpful discussions with Limor Raviv, Mark Dingemanse, Monica Tamariz, Seán Roberts and Stephen Levinson. We also wish to express our gratitude to Arduthie Primary School and Mill O'Forest Primary School, Stonehaven, for their support in running the experiments.Language transmission in adults and children 2 AbstractIterated language learning experiments have shown that meaningful and structured signalling systems emerge when there is pressure for signals to be both learnable andexpressive. Yet such experiments have mainly been conducted with adults using language-like signals. Here we explore whether structured signalling systems can also emerge when signalling domains are unfamiliar and when the learners are children with their well-attested cognitive and pragmatic limitations. In Experiment 1, we compared iterated learning of binary auditory sequences denoting small sets of meanings in chains of adults and 5-7-year old children. Signalling systems became more learnable even though iconicity and structure did not emerge despite applying a homonymy filter designed to keep the systems expressive. When the same types of signals were used in referential communication by adult and child dyads in Experiment 2, only the adults, but not the children, were able to negotiate shared iconic and structured signals. Referential communication using their native language by 4-5-year old children in Experiment 3 showed that only interaction with adults, but not with peers resulted in informative expressions. These findings suggest that emergence and transmission of communication systems is unlikely to be driven by children, and point to the importance of cognitive maturity and pragmatic expertise of learners as well as feedback-based scaffolding of communicative effectiveness by experts during language evolution.

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“…For instance, research suggests that in the U.S., measures related to socio‐economic status (SES), like maternal education, influence the amount and quality of speech heard by children (Cartmill et al., ; Hart & Risley, ; Rowe, , ; Tulkin & Kagan, ). When we look across cultures, we also see that there can be very large differences in the amount of speech directed to children (Cristia, Dupoux, Gurven, & Stieglitz, ; Shneidman & Goldin‐Meadow, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Do North American Babies Hear? A large‐scale cross‐corpus analysis

Bergelson

Casillas

Söderström

et al. 2018

Developmental Science

125

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A range of demographic variables influence how much speech young children hear. However, because studies have used vastly different sampling methods, quantitative comparison of interlocking demographic effects has been nearly impossible, across or within studies. We harnessed a unique collection of existing naturalistic, day-long recordings from 61 homes across four North American cities to examine language input as a function of age, gender, and maternal education. We analyzed adult speech heard by 3- to 20-month-olds who wore audio recorders for an entire day. We annotated speaker gender and speech register (child-directed or adult-directed) for 10,861 utterances from female and male adults in these recordings. Examining age, gender, and maternal education collectively in this ecologically-valid dataset, we find several key results. First, the speaker gender imbalance in the input is striking: children heard 2–3× more speech from females than males. Second, children in higher-maternal-education homes heard more child-directed speech than those in lower-maternal education homes. Finally, our analyses revealed a previously unreported effect: the proportion of child-directed speech in the input increases with age, due to a decrease in adult-directed speech with age. This large-scale analysis is an important step forward in collectively examining demographic variables that influence early development, made possible by pooled, comparable, day-long recordings of children’s language environments. The audio recordings, annotations, and annotation software are readily available for re-use and re-analysis by other researchers.

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Child‐Directed Speech Is Infrequent in a Forager‐Farmer Population: A Time Allocation Study

Cited by 183 publications

References 61 publications

Day by day, hour by hour: Naturalistic language input to infants

Day by day, hour by hour: Naturalistic language input to infants

Adults are more efficient in creating and transmitting novel signalling systems than children

What Do North American Babies Hear? A large‐scale cross‐corpus analysis

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