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.

Infant‐directed speech facilitates word learning through attentional mechanisms: An fNIRS study of toddlers

“…As fNIRS has shown to be a technique versatile enough for studying infants and toddlers and its use does not require the subjective judgment of a highly trained clinical professional, a host of clinical studies related to early intervention can be conducted using fNIRS. For example, studies can examine whether parent coaching (Roberts & Kaiser, 2015) can alter neural activities of the child as well as parent‐child neural attunement (Nguyen et al., 2021) and whether changes in neural activities are associated with language developmental outcome (Cychosz, 2022).…”

Bilingual language input to infants in Bolivia and the United States

“…Quechua is still spoken throughout southern Bolivia, particularly among adults, but inter-generational transmission tends to be disrupted the closer a family resides to a major urban area. See Cychosz (2022) for further detail about the sociolinguistic context. The U.S. bilingual community represented in this study is comprised of first-generation immigrants from Latin America (see section 3.1 for detail).…”

Long-form recordings in low- and middle-income countries: recommendations to achieve respectful research

“…This is problematic as there is a need for better representation of all cultures and linguistic experiences for greater equity and diversity in research. Motivated by these considerations, researchers have more recently started to collect long-form audio recordings in LMICs, namely Bolivia (Cychosz, 2022; Scaff, 2019), China (Ma et al, 2021), India (Fibla Reixachs, 2021; Meera et al, 2023; Swaminathan et al, 2022), Mexico (Casillas et al, 2020; Nee, 2021), Papua New Guinea (Casillas et al, 2021), Senegal (Weber et al, 2017), Solomon Islands (Cassar et al, 2022), Vanuatu (Cristia et al, 2023) and Vietnam (Ganek and Eriks-Brophy, 2018b). 2 Although this work increases the diversity of participant samples, it is far from representative of live births, which in 2021 happened primarily in LMICs with 19% in low-income countries, 72% in middle-income countries and 9% in high-income countries (based on data from Our World in Data, 2022).…”