Research seminar: Everyday language input fundamental for language development

Seminar

Date: Monday 11 March 2024

Time: 15.00 – 16.30

Location: Room C307, Department of Linguistics

Iris-Corinna Schwarz, Associate Professor in Linguistics and Lecturer at the Dept. of Special Education, and Ellen Marklund, Associate Professor in Linguistics, will present the results of a recently published study with 1001 children across six continents that demonstrated the fundamental role of speech input for child language development.

Foto: Kasto80/Mostphotos

Abstract

That speech input is important for child language development is nothing new. What is new, is that socio-economic status, child gender and multilingualism do not predict child language development, as a recent publication of a large international group of researchers showed. The study looked at data from wider and more diverse contexts than any other previous study on language development did before, spanning about 40 000 hours of recordings from 18 corpora in 12 countries on 6 continents. The recordings contain the audio context of days in the lives of 1001 children between 2 months and 4 years of age, growing up with 10 primary languages and 33 additional ones. Girls do not learn language faster than boys, children growing up with two or more languages are not slower than those learning only one and the level of maternal education does not affect language development. It is the everyday language input that predicts how much children talk.

Iris-Corinna Schwarz and Ellen Marklund contributed Swedish data to the study’s large international dataset and present the study’s results at the seminar.

Article reference

Bergelson, E., Soderstrom, M., Schwarz, I. C., Rowland, C. F., Ramírez-Esparza, N., R. Hamrick, L., Marklund, E., Kalashnikova, M. Guez, A., Casillas, M., Benetti, L., von Alphen, P. & Cristia, A. (2023). Everyday language input and production in 1,001 children from six continents. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(52), e2300671120.

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2300671120