What Do North American Babies Hear? A large-scale cross-corpus analysis.

Bergelson, Elika

Casillas, Marisa

Soderstrom, Melanie

Seidl, Amanda

Warlaumont, Anne S

Amatuni, Andrei

2020-01-01T18:49:01Z

2020-01-01T18:49:01Z

2019-01

2020-01-01T18:48:59Z

A range of demographic variables influences how much speech young children hear. However, because studies have used vastly different sampling methods, quantitative comparison of interlocking demographic effects has been nearly impossible, across or within studies. We harnessed a unique collection of existing naturalistic, day-long recordings from 61 homes across four North American cities to examine language input as a function of age, gender, and maternal education. We analyzed adult speech heard by 3- to 20-month-olds who wore audio recorders for an entire day. We annotated speaker gender and speech register (child-directed or adult-directed) for 10,861 utterances from female and male adults in these recordings. Examining age, gender, and maternal education collectively in this ecologically valid dataset, we find several key results. First, the speaker gender imbalance in the input is striking: children heard 2-3× more speech from females than males. Second, children in higher-maternal education homes heard more child-directed speech than those in lower-maternal education homes. Finally, our analyses revealed a previously unreported effect: the proportion of child-directed speech in the input increases with age, due to a decrease in adult-directed speech with age. This large-scale analysis is an important step forward in collectively examining demographic variables that influence early development, made possible by pooled, comparable, day-long recordings of children's language environments. The audio recordings, annotations, and annotation software are readily available for reuse and reanalysis by other researchers.

1363-755X

1467-7687

https://hdl.handle.net/10161/19713

eng

Wiley

Developmental science

10.1111/desc.12724

Humans

Language Development

Speech Perception

Sex Factors

Demography

Tape Recording

Adult

Child, Preschool

Infant

Educational Status

United States

Female

Male

What Do North American Babies Hear? A large-scale cross-corpus analysis.

Journal article

Bergelson, Elika|0000-0003-2742-4797

e12724

1

Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

Duke

Psychology and Neuroscience

Linguistics

Duke Institute for Brain Sciences

University Institutes and Centers

Institutes and Provost's Academic Units

Surgery, Head and Neck Surgery and Communication Sciences

Surgery

Clinical Science Departments

School of Medicine

Published

22