“…In recent decades, research on language acquisition has focused, to a large extent, on variation in language input and, in particular, the number of words children hear in naturalistic settings. This line of work was sparked by the finding that children who receive more input—especially speech directly addressing them—have larger vocabularies (Bang, Bohn, et al, 2023; Hart & Risley, 1995; Huttenlocher et al, 1991; Shneidman & Goldin-Meadow, 2012; Walker et al, 1994; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). From a theoretical perspective, more language input increases children’s opportunities for learning word-meaning mappings and allows them to build a larger vocabulary (Jones & Rowland, 2017; Kachergis et al, 2022; McMurray et al, 2012).…”