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Child‐Directed Speech Is Infrequent in a Forager‐Farmer Population: A Time Allocation Study
Author(s) -
Cristia Alejandrina,
Dupoux Emmanuel,
Gurven Michael,
Stieglitz Jonathan
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/cdev.12974
Subject(s) - psychology , variation (astronomy) , daylight , population , developmental psychology , demography , sociology , physics , astrophysics , optics
This article provides an estimation of how frequently, and from whom, children aged 0–11 years ( N s 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.