Early language experience in a Papuan community

Abstract

The rate at which young children are directly spoken to varies due to many factors, including (a) caregiver ideas about children as conversational partners and (b) the organization of everyday life. Prior work suggests cross-cultural variation in rates of child-directed speech is due to the former factor, but has been fraught with confounds in comparing postindustrial and subsistence farming communities. We investigate the daylong language environments of children (0;0–3;0) on Rossel Island, Papua New Guinea, a small-scale traditional community where prior ethnographic study demonstrated contingency-seeking child interaction styles. In fact, children were infrequently directly addressed and linguistic input rate was primarily affected by situational factors, though children's vocalization maturity showed no developmental delay. We compare the input characteristics between this community and a Tseltal Mayan one in which near-parallel methods produced comparable results, then briefly discuss the models and mechanisms for learning best supported by our findings.

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

“…Yet it is equally acknowledged that the children socialized into these cultures acquire their native language(s) and reach core language development milestones (Casillas et al 2019(Casillas et al , 2020Cychosz et al to appear). Here, again, the fine-grained measures of acoustic phonetics have the potential to make a substantial contribution.…”

(Non-)effects of linguistic environment on early stable consonant production: A crosscultural case study

“…The language, which has two main dialects, is in vigorous use as well, with a loosely estimated 5000-7000 native speakers, most of whom are at least partly bilingual in English, Tok Pisin, and/or other languages of Papua New Guinea (Levinson in press;Eberhard et al 2020). Many aspects of daily life, as well as the overall rate of CDS, are similar between these two patrilocally organized, horticulturalist communities (Casillas et al 2020a;. Before age 3;0, children in both communities are directly addressed around 3-3.5 minutes per hour during waking days at home (Casillas et al 2020a;.…”

“…Many aspects of daily life, as well as the overall rate of CDS, are similar between these two patrilocally organized, horticulturalist communities (Casillas et al 2020a;. Before age 3;0, children in both communities are directly addressed around 3-3.5 minutes per hour during waking days at home (Casillas et al 2020a;. While the quantity of directed linguistic input is relatively similar, the consonant inventories of the two languages are highly distinct from each other.…”

“…For example, many scholars focusing on language development in non-urban contexts have highlighted the role of observable third-party behavior for learning (e.g., Rogoff et al 1993;Chavajay & Rogoff 1999;Gaskins & Paradise 2010). In addition to VMS, we also attempt to replicate the finding that CB onset shows no delayed development in these two communities, this time using a larger sample and independent annotations from the original study data (Casillas et al 2020a;.…”

“…The robustness of this overall developmental trajectory is underscored in contexts where children are infrequently directly addressed; despite the infrequent use of child-directed speech (henceforth CDS) in some communities-as is the case in the unrelated Tseltal and Yélî Dnye speech communities-children's lexical vocalizations showed a similar onset as compared to children in more CDS-rich settings (Casillas et al 2020a;. This result appears, at face value, to run counter to other work clearly showing that CDS is strongly associated with fastergrowing receptive and productive vocabularies (e.g., Hart & Risley 1995;Hoff 2003;Shneidman & Goldin-Meadow 2012;Weisleder & Fernald 2013).…”