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Article published In: Interactions and Language Acquisition in Non-Family Settings
Edited by Caroline Masson
[Language, Interaction and Acquisition 15:1] 2024
► pp. 24–56

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Child activity contexts and language environments

Perspective from daylong audio recordings of American English-speaking children

 | University of Lille
 | University of Alberta
 | University of Manitoba
Published online: 14 November 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lia.00021.gla
Abstract
Activity contexts are increasingly recognized as important for the variation observed in the type and quantity of speech heard by children. However, there is little data from children’s everyday experiences to properly study this role. We analyzed the quantity of target child-directed speech (TDS) and other-directed speech (ODS) according to children’s activity contexts. We used Daylong Audio Recordings of American English children aged 6–17 months old from the Bergelson Seedlings corpus. A higher quantity of ODS per minute was observed in Solitary playful and exploratory activity contexts, while a higher quantity of TDS per minute was observed in Social activity contexts in comparison to other activity contexts. However, the interindividual variation found needs to be further explored. These results highlight the link between the language environment and activity contexts, and their importance for understanding child language development.
Résumé
Il est de plus en plus reconnu que les contextes d’activité jouent un rôle dans la variation individuelle du type et de la quantité de parole entendue par les enfants. Cependant, les données provenant des expériences quotidiennes des enfants sont encore peu nombreuses pour permettre une étude approfondie de ce rôle. Nous avons donc analysé la quantité de discours adressé à l’enfant cible (TDS) et de discours adressé aux autres (ODS) en fonction des contextes d’activité des enfants. Cette analyse a été réalisée à l’aide d’enregistrements audio d’une journée d’enfants américains anglophones âgés de 6 à 17 mois provenant du corpus Bergelson Seedlings. Il a été observé une plus grande quantité d’ODS par minute en contexte ludique et exploratoire solitaire, et une plus grande quantité de TDS par minute en contexte social par rapport aux autres contextes. Cependant, une variation interindividuelle a également été observée et doit être explorée au regard d’autres facteurs de variation. Ces résultats mettent en évidence le lien entre l’environnement linguistique et les contextes d’activité, ainsi que leur importance pour comprendre le développement du langage chez l’enfant.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Context as an input variation factor
    • 1.2Challenges in the study of activity context
    • 1.3Three studies observing activity contexts in everyday life
    • 1.4Categorization of child activity contexts from everyday life: Further research required
    • 1.5The current study
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Corpus description
      • 2.1.1Corpus used
      • 2.1.2Sampling: The Seedlings subsample
    • 2.2Transcription
    • 2.3Annotations
      • 2.3.1Existing annotation: Coding the addressee
      • 2.3.2Newly-introduced annotations: Coding activity contexts
        • 2.3.2.1The coding system
        • 2.3.2.2Coding system application
    • 2.4Inter-transcriber reliability
    • 2.5Data processing and analysis
      • 2.5.1Word counting
      • 2.5.2Statistical analyses
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Overall observation on activity context duration
    • 3.2All-directed speech (ALLDS) according to activity contexts
    • 3.3Quantity of ODS according to activity contexts
    • 3.4Quantity of TDS according to activity contexts
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Activity context lengths
    • 4.2All-directed speech across activity contexts
    • 4.3Other-directed speech across activity contexts
    • 4.4Target child-directed speech across activity contexts
    • 4.5Summary and target child-directed speech vs. other-directed speech
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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