2018 Sat Poster 6466

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Poster Session II, Metcalf Small | 3:15pm

How much speech do Tseltal Mayan children hear?: Daylong averages and interactional bursts
M. Casillas

We need quantitative descriptions of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic variation in children’s speech environments to formulate well-grounded theories about language-learning mechanisms (Lieven, 1994; Nielsen et al., 2017). By studying language development in non-WEIRD communities we can more easily study factors rare in our own modern societies, e.g., large, multi-generational households, low literacy in the language being learned, minimal adult control on children’s activities, etc. In this vein, Mayan caregivers have gained some prominence after decades of careful ethnographic work across several communities (e.g., Rogoff et al., 1993; de Leon, 1998; Gaskins, 2006) documented a consistent pattern of infrequent child-directed speech. For example, Shneidman and Goldin-Meadow (2012) found that Yucatec Mayan children hear fewer utterances per hour and many fewer directed utterances per hour compared to US children. Given such infrequent child-directed speech, it seems that young Mayan children might be adept at learning from overheard speech, but Shneidman and Goldin-Meadow (2012) found that directed speech—not overheard speech—predicted those children’s vocabularies. How then do Mayan children become competent adult speakers?

The current study investigates the early language experience of 10 Tseltal Mayan children growing up in a traditional community in the highlands of Chiapas. Each child was recorded via a small, chest-worn audio recorder and miniature camera for 9–11 hours during a single day. The data come from a larger collection of such recordings from 56 kids in 43 households between 0 and 50 months old (WITHHELD). The recordings analyzed here were selected as part of a larger comparative project, maximizing child age (0–3;6), gender, and maternal education variance in the sample (WITHHELD). From each recording, 1 hour has been transcribed and annotated, distributed over twenty 1–5-minute clips (Table 1). Annotated clips included speech from the target child plus an average of 2.8 other speakers, 1.1 of whom were children (range: 0–10). Multiple speakers led to overlapped speech for 7.8% of annotated time (by-child range: 1.8%–13.3%). Proportion speech directed to children only moderately increased with age (Figure 1), in both randomly sampled and high-activity audio clips, with change more attributable to a decrease in all speech (“XDS”) than an increase in speech directed exclusively to the target child (“TCDS”; see also WITHHELD). Speech addressed to the target-child was much more frequent in high-activity clips (mean: 10.9 min/hr; median: 8.6 min/hr) than randomly selected ones (mean: 3.4 min/hr; median: 1.4 min/hr), with randomly selected rates comparable to findings from similar populations (Cristia et al., 2017). Finally, most of the speech came from adults, not children (Figure 2), in a pattern markedly different from that reported by Shneidman and Goldin-Meadow (2012). These findings suggest that there may be variation among Mayan communities in how young children are spoken to. Alternately, daylong recording techniques may reveal patterns different from short home visits (see also Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2017). These data will next be integrated with time-of-day information to suss out daily-cycle patterns before continuing with formal analyses.