Multiple paths to language: Capturing the language learning environment and early language knowledge in Tseltal Maya infants

Study Context

Through its historical research focus on Western, middle-class infants, theories of how children learn language imply that there is a single pathway to language, one that involves frequent adult speech to children even before children can meaningfully reply. Yet a parallel intellectual history in anthropology suggests that infants raised in contexts with little child-directed speech might develop distinct patterns of attention and skills at ‘listening in’. The researchers sought evidence from infants in an indigenous context in Mexico to bear on this hypothesis, and more generally, the degree to which language-learning strategies represent environmental adaptations, versus universal mechanisms.

Study Design

This study proposed to (1) develop a novel battery of culturally sensitive language assessments for use in an indigenous context in Mexico, informed by pilot data and naturalistic recordings from children’s own environments, and (2) use these assessments to test the presence of linguistic knowledge in infants exposed exclusively to overheard speech. The research team annotated and analyzed naturalistic recordings from 1521 experimental trials testing infants’ knowledge of high-frequency nouns (e.g., words for livestock and common baby foods) gathered in 2020 to document the daily language environments of the infants participating in the study.

Results and Policy Lessons

Experiment 1 deployed a task used to show early knowledge of common English nouns among U.S. infants, and showed that Tseltal infants exhibit analogous knowledge of common Tseltal nouns, despite receiving far less child-directed language than their U.S. peers. Supporting the idea that Tseltal infants derive their early lexical knowledge in part from other-directed language, infants in Experiment 2 showed knowledge of Tseltal honorific greeting terms that are exclusively used between adult members of the community and could thus only be learned via overhearing.

Together, these findings provide evidence that infants can and do learn from the other-directed language in their environments, and suggest that learning via overhearing may be an important path toward developing language for some infants, contrary to prior claims that other-directed language is of little value to young language learners.