Infrequent Child-Directed Speech Is Bursty and May Draw Infant Vocalizations

TL;DR

This study shows that infrequent child-directed speech is bursty and can effectively stimulate infant vocalizations, highlighting the importance of temporal patterns and social sources in language development across different communities.

Contribution

It reveals that infrequent, bursty child-directed speech from various sources can promote infant vocalizations, emphasizing the role of temporal clustering and social context in language learning.

Findings

Child-directed speech is bursty in both Bolivia and the U.S.

Infants are more likely to vocalize during directed speech periods.

Older children significantly contribute to infant vocalizations in Bolivia.

Abstract

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 during periods of speech directed to them, with the probability of infants' speech-like vocalizations during target child-directed speech nearly double that during silence. In Bolivia, infants' speech-like vocalizations were also more likely to occur during bouts of directed speech from older children than from adults. Together, these findings suggest that the developmental impact of child-directed speech may depend not only on quantity, but on temporal concentration and source, with older children serving as an important source of input in some communities, including where adult speech to infants is less frequent.