Activity types and child-directed speech: a comparison between French, Tunisian Arabic and English

Abstract

Quantity and quality of input affect language development, but input features also depend on the context of language emission. Previous research has described mother-child interactions and their impact on language development according to activity types like mealtimes, book reading, and free play. Nevertheless, few studies have sought to quantify activity types in naturalistic datasets including less-studied languages and cultures. Our research questions are the following: we ask whether regularities emerge in the distribution of activity types across languages and recordings, and whether activities have an impact on mothers' linguistic productions. We analyse input for two children per language, at three developmental levels. We distinguish three activity types: solitary, social and maintenance activities, and measure mothers' linguistic productions within each type. Video-recorded activities differ across families and developmental levels. Linguistic features of child-directed speech (CDS) also vary across activities – notably for measures of diversity and complexity – which points to complex interactions between activity and language.

Nouns and verbs in the linguistic environment of Argentinian toddlers: Socioeconomic and context-related differences

“…In a second step the aforementioned types of activity were clustered according to two criteria adapted from categories developed in previous studies (Glas et al, 2018; Weisleder et al, 2019). We determined whether the activity was centered on the household life or on the child.…”

“…Findings in this stream indicate that caregivers' speech varies considerably as a function of contextual characteristics typically defined by culture and social environments: e.g. the type and structure of the ongoing activity (Glas et al, 2018;Goldfield, 1993;Söderström & Wittebolle, 2013;Tamis-LeMonda et al, 2019;Weisleder et al, 2019), the variety of objects used (Brown, 2014), and the presence, quantity, age and role of other participants in the interactions (Hoff, 2006). Thus, research has explored whether culturally-defined features of interactional routines and/or the ongoing activities help explain the cross-linguistic differences in the input.…”

“…It is noteworthy that CDS comprises only a portion of children’s linguistic exposure, and that the distribution of CDS and the speech that children overhear (OHS) varies between families, cultures and socioeconomic groups (Sperry et al, 2019). Nonetheless, the studies that identified the predominance of certain grammatical categories based their conclusions only on CDS (e.g., Altınkamış et al, 2014; Choi & Gopnik, 1995; Glas et al, 2018; Goldfield, 1993, 2000; Jackson-Maldonado et al, 2011; Tardif, 1996), did not discriminate between CDS and OHS (Stoll et al, 2012) or compared CDS with adult-directed speech (ADS) collected in an experimental situation (Adi-Bensaid et al, 2015). Moreover, despite the mounting evidence that demonstrates the impact of socioeconomic status (SES) on the quantity, diversity and pragmatic characteristics of the input (see Pace et al, 2017; Schwab & Lew-Williams, 2016, for reviews), the influence of SES on the frequency and situational context in which children are exposed to nouns and verbs in daily conversations has not yet been assessed.…”

“…Recently, Glas et al’s (2018) naturalistic study revealed a greater proportion of verbs in Tunisian than in English and French households. Interestingly, their results indicated that cross-linguistic and sociocultural variability in everyday life is less pronounced during social activities, such as book-reading and play, than in maintenance activities (feeding and hygiene).…”

Acoustic-lexical characteristics of child-directed speech between 7 and 24 months and their impact on toddlers' phonological processing

“…While these studies demonstrate a fairly comprehensive understanding of age-related changes in the acoustics of CDS, our descriptions of phonological-lexical characteristics of CDS, as well as how they change over time, are more superficial. For example, it is well known that the number of word types, and frequency of rare words, in CDS increases as children age (Glas, Rossi, Hamdi-Sultan, Batailler, & Bellemmouche, 2018;M. L. Rowe, 2012).…”