A cross-cultural examination of young children’s everyday language experiences

Studies of cross-cultural variation in children’s early at-home linguistic experience has previously lacked consistency in methodology across populations. Here young children’s language exposure is quantified across communities speaking North American English, UK English, Argentinian Spanish, Yélî Dnye, and Tseltal. The data includes annotations from 69 daylong, naturalistic recordings of 2–36-month-olds (35 Females & 34 males). Focusing on speaker gender, age, and addressee in randomly selected clips from each recording the results revealed that speech quantity to children was remarkably stable across age and child-directed speech primarily comes from women. Finally, variability in relative rates of adult-, target child-, and child-directed speech across communities are reported. Critically, this work provides a cross-cultural approach to understanding young children’s early language experiences.