Sticks, leaves, buckets, and bowls: Distributional patterns of children’s at-home object handling in two subsistence societies

Casey, Kennedy; Elliott, Mary; Mickiewicz, E.; Mandujano, Anapaula Silva; Shorter, Kimberly; Duquette, Mara; Bergelson, Elika; Casillas, Marisa

doi:10.31234/osf.io/yfnj4

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…To illustrate, annotations of the object interactions by 0- to 48-month-old children from Rossel Papuan and Tseltal Mayan farming communities—based on daylong photos taken with small cameras children wore on their chests—revealed similarities in the categories of objects that children touched (e.g., mealtime tools, natural objects) but differences in the artifacts specific to each culture. Children interacted with objects such as blankets, buckets, sticks, bowls, purses, and brooms, in line with opportunities in their environments (Casey et al, 2022).…”

Section: Embedded Learning: the Structured Environmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Embodied and Embedded Learning: Child, Caregiver, and Context

Tamis-LeMonda

Masek

2023

Curr Dir Psychol Sci

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The pace of infant learning is inspiring. Babies learn new skills while interacting with the people, objects, and spaces in their everyday environments. Grounded in a developmental-systems approach, we highlight the embodied and embedded nature of infant learning. Learning is embodied in that the exuberant infant serendipitously creates an ideal curriculum for learning through immense amounts of varied, time-distributed practice across behavioral domains. Learning is embedded in that infants’ behaviors elicit timely responses from caregivers that are situated in richly informative and structured environments. Feedback loops generated by the active infant, the salience of caregiver responses, and the regularity of environmental contexts propel learning. The study of natural behaviors in natural environments spotlights the roles of infant, caregiver, and context in everyday learning.

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Section: Embedded Learning: the Structured Environmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Embodied and Embedded Learning: Child, Caregiver, and Context

Tamis-LeMonda

Masek

2023

Curr Dir Psychol Sci

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“…Our study joins recent and ongoing efforts to characterize the scope of diversity in language environments and potential language learning mechanisms ( 33 , 43 , 45 , 59 , 97 – 101 ). Because most prior work has been conducted in contexts where child-directed language is common, it is perhaps unsurprising that this work has focused on how and what children learn from child-directed language, and has highlighted such language as critical to learning.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 68%

Infants who are rarely spoken to nevertheless understand many words

Foushee,

Srinivasan

2024

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Theories of language development—informed largely by studies of Western, middleclass infants—have highlighted the language that caregivers direct to children as a key driver of language learning. However, some have argued that language development unfolds similarly across environmental contexts, including those in which childdirected language is scarce. This raises the possibility that children are able to learn from other sources of language in their environments, particularly the language directed to others in their environment. We explore this hypothesis with infants in an indigenous Tseltal-speaking community in Southern Mexico who are rarely spoken to, yet have the opportunity to overhear a great deal of other-directed language by virtue of being carried on their mothers’ backs. Adapting a previously established gaze-tracking method for detecting early word knowledge to our field setting, we find that Tseltal infants exhibit implicit knowledge of common nouns (Exp. 1), analogous to their US peers who are frequently spoken to. Moreover, they exhibit comprehension of Tseltal honorific terms that are exclusively used to greet adults in the community (Exp. 2), representing language that could only have been learned through overhearing. In so doing, Tseltal infants demonstrate an ability to discriminate words with similar meanings and perceptually similar referents at an earlier age than has been shown among Western children. Together, these results suggest that for some infants, learning from overhearing may be an important path toward developing language.

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“…76, 77). § Our study joins recent and ongoing efforts to characterize the scope of diversity in language environments and potential language learning mechanisms (33,43,(77)(78)(79)(80)(81)(82)(83). Because most prior work has been conducted in contexts where child-directed language is common, it is perhaps unsurprising that this work has focused on how and what children learn from child-directed language, and has highlighted such language as critical to learning.…”

Section: R a F Tmentioning

confidence: 85%

Infants who are rarely spoken to nevertheless understand many words

Foushee¹,

Srinivasan²

2023

Preprint

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Theories of language development---informed largely by studies of Western, middle-class infants---have highlighted the language that caregivers direct to children as a key driver of language learning. However, some have argued that language development unfolds similarly across environmental contexts, including those in which child-directed language is scarce. This raises the possibility that children adapt their learning strategies to the language available in their environments, such that some children come to rely on speech that they overhear. We explore this hypothesis with infants in an indigenous Tseltal-speaking community in Southern Mexico, who are rarely spoken to, yet overhear a great deal of other-directed language by virtue of being carried on their mothers' backs. Adapting a previously-established gaze-tracking method for detecting early word knowledge to our field setting, we find that, like Western infants, Tseltal infants exhibit implicit knowledge of high-frequency nouns (Exp. 1). Moreover, they exhibit comprehension of Tseltal honorific terms used to greet adults in the community (Exp. 2). Notably, these honorific terms represent language that could only have been acquired through overhearing, and infants' task performance demonstrates an ability to discriminate highly similar stimuli at an earlier age than has been shown among Western children. Together, these results suggest that for some infants, learning from overhearing may be an important path toward developing language.

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Sticks, leaves, buckets, and bowls: Distributional patterns of children’s at-home object handling in two subsistence societies

Cited by 5 publications

References 27 publications

Embodied and Embedded Learning: Child, Caregiver, and Context

Embodied and Embedded Learning: Child, Caregiver, and Context

Infants who are rarely spoken to nevertheless understand many words

Infants who are rarely spoken to nevertheless understand many words

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