Learning language in vivo

Abstract

In this article, I advocate for an enriched view of children's linguistic input, with the aim of building sustainable and tangible links between theoretical models of language development and families' everyday experiences. Children's language experiences constrain theoretical models in ways that may illuminate universal learning biases. However, more than that, these experiences provide a staggering array of test cases and demonstrate the stage‐setting effects of situational, familial, and societal context on language use and uptake. Centering on activity type as an entry point into context, I outline an approach—which I refer to as language in vivo—that draws on both big‐ and small‐data methods to generate grounded, informative, and representative descriptions of children's input. Minimally, this approach complements recent work that uses more bundled input measures. Maximally, an in vivo approach could inspire new questions, insights, and innovations to broaden the coverage and application of theoretical models to individual communities and families.

Infant-Directed Communication: Examining the many dimensions of everyday caregiver-infant interactions

“…Additionally, much of the investigation of variation in infants' everyday input across families and communities has focused on speech (e.g., Casillas & Cristia, 2019;Cristia, 2023;Tamis-LeMonda et al, 2019), and minimal work with diverse populations has examined nonspeech dimensions of variation in infants' everyday communicative input (but see Depowski et al, 2015;Gabouer et al, 2020). Examining the sources and correlates of variation in infants' everyday experienceacross communities and cultures, in a variety of everyday activity contexts, and from moment to momentcan provide important insight into how infants learn in the natural, everyday environments in which they are actually doing this learning (Adolph, 2020;Casillas, 2023;de Barbaro, 2019;de Barbaro & Fausey, 2022).…”

“…This is problematic when the results of controlled experiments are taken as evidence for mechanisms of early learning that generalize beyond the lab. Controlled experiments provide important insight into how infants can learn, but until we have improved characterizations of "learning in vivo" (Casillas, 2023) and better understand how learning mechanisms are instantiated in the real world, it may be problematic to generalize the results of controlled experiments to how infants actually do learn in their real, everyday learning environments.…”

“…Additionally, much of this research has been conducted in laboratory settings, and less is known about how caregivers use these behaviors in everyday, natural interactions with their infants, hindering our ability to make strong inferences about early learning (e.g., Adolph, 2020;Casillas, 2023;de Barbaro, 2019). Thus, the goal of the current study is to augment research on IDS by investigating "infant-directed communication" (IDC): the suite of communicative signals from caregivers to infants including speech, action, gesture, emotion, and touch.…”

Mealtime conversations between parents and their 2-year-old children in five cultural contexts

“…Yet, children still reach major milestones in language development at similar ages (Brown & Gaskins, 2014;Casillas, Brown, & MEALTIME CONVERSATIONS IN FIVE CULTURAL CONTEXTS 6 Levinson, 2020). These findings highlight that theories and models of language learning need to extend beyond quantity of input and also include learning processes that compensate for variation in input (Bang, Mora, Munévar, Fernald, & Marchman, 2022;Casillas, 2022;Jones & Rowland, 2017;Kachergis et al, 2022;Meylan & Bergelson, 2022).…”

Towards a just and equitable applied psycholinguistics

“…Applied psycholinguistics as a field has historically depended on a distinction between “normal” and “deviant” human languaging. This approach has reinforced monolingualism, native-speakerism, accentism, and ableism, all of which ultimately essentialize the bodies of language users to arbitrary normative categories (see scholars who have written about these issues: Auer, 2007; Namboodiripad & Henner, 2022; Cheng et al, 2021; Tiv et al, 2021; Kutlu et al, 2022; Goldrick, 2022; Majid, 2023; Castro et al, 2022; Craft et al, 2020; Hayes-Harb et al, 2023; Casillas, 2023). But, who is a monolingual?…”