Child-Directed Speech Is Infrequent in a Forager-Farmer Population: A Time Allocation Study.
By Alejandrina Cristia, Emmanuel Dupoux, Michael Gurven, J. Stieglitz. 2019
192 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This article provides an estimation of how frequently, and from whom, children aged 0–11 years (Ns between 9 and 24) receive one-on-one verbal input among Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of lowland Bolivia. Analyses of systematic daytime behavioral observations reveal < 1 min per daylight hour is spent talking to children younger than 4 years of age, which is 4 times less than estimates for others present at the same time and place. Adults provide a majority of the input at 0–3 years of age but not afterward. When integrated with previous work, these results reveal large cross-cultural variation in the linguistic experiences provided to young children. Consideration of more diverse human populations is necessary to build generalizable theories of language acquisition.
Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Language and Linguistics, Social Sciences & Humanities
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Citations in the corpus
- How Can We Accelerate Progress Towards Human-like Linguistic Generalization? (2020, background): “…less linguistic input than that (around 3 million words per year, Hart and Risley 1995); even more strikingly, members of the Tsimane community in Bolivia spend about 15 times less time per hour speaking to their children than do highly educated American families (Cristia et al., 2019).”