ArticleDevelopmental science2019
What Do North American Babies Hear? A large-scale cross-corpus analysis.
Article in Developmental science, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
46 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- From data to discovery: Technology propels speech-language research and theory-building in developmental science.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2025Pooled it
- Accuracy of the Language Environment Analysis System Segmentation and Metrics: A Systematic Review.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2020Pooled it
- Some culture is hiding in plain sight in research on child development.The British journal of developmental psychology · 2026Review
- Music and speech input in the home environments of Latinx infants.Infant behavior & development · 2026Article
- Theoretical and Methodological Insights From Five Transcribed and Annotated Daylong Audio Recordings of Young Children's Language Environments.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2026Article
- How Do Infants Eat at Home? A Preliminary Study of Complementary Feeding Skills in the Naturalistic Environment.American journal of speech-language pathology · 2026Observational
- The road to negation: A comparative study of five typologically and culturally diverse languages.First language · 2025Article
- A year of nouns from English-learning infants' daily lives: The SEEDLingS-Nouns dataset.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Conversation Initiation in Families With a Toddler Who Is Deaf or Hard of Hearing.American journal of speech-language pathology · 2025Article
- Computational modeling approaches to emotional development.Developmental psychology · 2025Review
- The everyday speech environments of preschoolers with and without cochlear implants.Journal of child language · 2025Article
- Validation of the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) Automated Speech Processing Algorithm Labels for Adult and Child Segments in a Sample of Families From India.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2025Article
- Pitch characteristics of real-world infant-directed speech vary with pragmatic context, perceived adult gender, and infant gender.PloS one · 2025Article
- Early selective attention to the articulating mouth as a potential female-specific marker of better language development in autism: a review.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Bursty, Irregular Speech Input to Children Predicts Vocabulary Size.Developmental science · 2025Article
- Supporting Early Language by Supporting Systemic Solutions.Policy insights from the behavioral and brain sciences · 2024Article
- Comparison of speech and music input in North American infants' home environment over the first 2 years of life.Developmental science · 2024Article
- Consistency and variability in multimodal parent-child social interaction: An at-home study using head-mounted eye trackers.Developmental psychology · 2024Article
- Infants who are rarely spoken to nevertheless understand many words.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Relating referential clarity and phonetic clarity in infant-directed speech.Developmental science · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
A range of demographic variables influences how much speech young children hear. However, because studies have used vastly different sampling methods, quantitative comparison of interlocking demographic effects has been nearly impossible, across or within studies. We harnessed a unique collection of existing naturalistic, day-long recordings from 61 homes across four North American cities to examine language input as a function of age, gender, and maternal education. We analyzed adult speech heard by 3- to 20-month-olds who wore audio recorders for an entire day. We annotated speaker gender and speech register (child-directed or adult-directed) for 10,861 utterances from female and male adults in these recordings. Examining age, gender, and maternal education collectively in this ecologically valid dataset, we find several key results. First, the speaker gender imbalance in the input is striking: children heard 2-3× more speech from females than males. Second, children in higher-maternal education homes heard more child-directed speech than those in lower-maternal education homes. Finally, our analyses revealed a previously unreported effect: the proportion of child-directed speech in the input increases with age, due to a decrease in adult-directed speech with age. This large-scale analysis is an important step forward in collectively examining demographic variables that influence early development, made possible by pooled, comparable, day-long recordings of children's language environments. The audio recordings, annotations, and annotation software are readily available for reuse and reanalysis by other researchers.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.