Infrequent Child-Directed Speech Is Bursty and May Draw Infant Vocalizations
Children in many parts of the world hear relatively little speech directed to them, yet still reach major language development milestones. What differs about the speech input that infants learn from when directed input is rare? Using longform, infant-centered audio recordings taken in rural Bolivia and the urban U.S., we examined temporal patterns of infants' speech input and their pre-linguistic vocal behavior. We find that child-directed speech in Bolivia, though less frequent, was just as temporally clustered as speech input in the U.S, arriving in concentrated bursts rather than spread across the day. In both communities, infants were most likely to produce speech-like vocalizations d...
| Authors | Margaret Cychosz, Adriana Weisleder |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 25 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 25 March 2026 |
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