ERIC Number: EJ1481809
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025-Sep
Pages: 9
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1363-755X
EISSN: EISSN-1467-7687
Available Date: 2025-07-20
Input to the Language Learning Infant: The Impact of Other Children
Johanna Schick1; Moritz M. Daum2,3; Sabine Stoll1
Developmental Science, v28 n5 e70045 2025
In urban, industrialized cultures, the best predictor of how children acquire their native language is child-directed speech from adults. However, in many societies, children are much less exposed to such input. What has remained unexplored is the impact of another type of input: other children's speech. In cross-cultural head-turn experiments, we demonstrate that Shipibo-Konibo infants (Peruvian Amazon) and Swiss infants (urban industrialized setting) show greater attention to children talking among themselves than to adults doing the same. We further show that, despite hearing more child-directed speech than child speech, Swiss infants equally attend to child-directed speech by adults and child speech. Interestingly, child-directed speech and child speech share acoustic and structural features. These findings suggest that, if available, the speech of other children may play an important role in language acquisition.
Descriptors: Linguistic Input, Infants, Native Language, Children, Foreign Countries, Cross Cultural Studies, Language Acquisition, German, American Indian Languages
Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www-wiley-com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-us
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Peru; Switzerland
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Data File: URL: https://osf.io/dercj/
Author Affiliations: 1Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; 2Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; 3Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

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