Language exposure predicts children’s phonetic patterning: Evidence from language shift

Abstract

Although understanding the role of the environment is central to language acquisition theory, rarely has this been studied for children’s phonetic development; and receptive and expressive language experiences in the environment are not distinguished. This last distinction may be crucial for child speech production in particular because production requires coordination of low-level speech-motor planning with high-level linguistic knowledge. In this study, the role of the environment is evaluated in a novel way—by studying phonetic development in a bilingual community undergoing rapid language shift. This sociolinguistic context provides a naturalistic gradient of the amount of children’s exposure to two languages and the ratio of expressive to receptive experiences. A largescale child language corpus encompassing over 500 hours of naturalistic South Bolivian Quechua and Spanish speech was efficiently annotated for children’s and their caregivers’ bilingual language use. These estimates were correlated with children’s patterns in a series of speech production tasks. The role of the environment varied by outcome: children’s expressive language experience best predicted their performance on a coarticulation-morphology measure while their receptive experience predicted performance on a lower-level measure of vowel variability. Overall these bilingual exposure effects suggest a pathway for children’s role in language change whereby language shift can result in different learning outcomes within a single speech community. Appropriate ways to model language exposure in development are discussed.

Combining observational and experimental approaches to the development of language and communication in rural samples: Opportunities and challenges

“…For the word repetition tasks too, coarticulation patterns varied as a function of morphological complexity in interaction with bilingual exposure, which was quantified from the long-form recording data. In short, children who spoke more Quechua in their daily lives showed stronger evidence of morphological decomposition in their Quechua word production (Cychosz, 2022b). Interestingly, this was not obvious when using parental report of bilingual exposure, highlighting the relevance of using direct measurements as opposed to indirect (e.g., parental) observations.…”

“…This allowed the efficient estimation of Quechua/Spanish use by the child as well as Quechua/Spanish exposure from other speakers (see also Cychosz et al, 2021), which would have been impossibly time-consuming if one would have wanted to exhaustively annotate the 500h of audio recordings found across the 40 participants in this study. Those ratios of bilingual language use were then employed to predict children's accuracy and morphological processing in repeating both words and non-words (Cychosz, 2022a(Cychosz, , 2022b.…”

“…Last but not least, many rural communities live in some degree of connection with a mainstream economic system, in which case there will be contact with other languages. As mentioned above for the case of children acquiring Quechua, the author made a point to measure the degree of individual children's exposure to Quechua and Spanish to model individual differences in the children's phonetic production and phonological processing (Cychosz, 2022a;2022b). Language contact and multilingualism also matter because caregivers may use both languages and hold various beliefs about each of them.…”

Analysis of children’s everyday language experiences using longform audio: promises and pitfalls (Análisis de las experiencias lingüísticas cotidianas de niños y niñas utilizando audio de formato largo: posibles ventajas y dificultades)

“…The infants in this study were spoken to infrequently, but met coarse indicators of language production (babble, first words, word combinations) on a similar timeline to Western infants. A number of other studies are currently in progress from these and other researchers in a more diverse sampling of communities, including Argentina (Rosemberg et al, 2020), rural Bolivia (Cychosz, 2020), Papua New Guinea (Casillas et al, 2020b), Vanuatu and Namibia (Zhang et al, 2018), among others (see also the ACLEW project, below).…”

“…La exposición de los niños que participaron en el estudio al HDN era infrecuente, pero alcanzaban los indicadores de producción lingüística incipiente (balbuceos, primeras palabras, combinaciones de palabras) en momentos similares del desarrollo que los niños occidentales. En la actualidad existen otros estudios de estos y otros investigadores en marcha en comunidades con muestras más diversas, por ejemplo en Argentina (Rosemberg et al, 2020), Bolivia rural (Cychosz, 2020), Papúa Nueva Guinea (Casillas et al, 2020b), Vanuatu y Namibia (Zhang et al, 2018), entre otros (véase también el proyecto ACLEW, más adelante).…”