ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Everyday language input and production in 1,001 children from six continents.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- From data to discovery: Technology propels speech-language research and theory-building in developmental science.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2025Pooled it
- Bridging Machine Learning and Event-Based Analyses to Assess Maternal Contingent Responses to Infant Nondistress and Distress Vocalizations From Home Audio Recordings.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Cascading Periods of Language-Related Brain Plasticity Across Early Childhood.Developmental science · 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
- Continuous developmental changes in word recognition and language learning across early childhood.eLife · 2026Article
- The role of mothers' speech for children's education beyond the early years.Child development · 2026Article
- Classification errors distort findings in automated speech processing: Examples and solutions from child-development research.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Early child measures outpredict input measures of preschool language skills in U.S. English learners.Developmental psychology · 2026Article
- Thinking Critically About Algorithms for Automated Detection of Behavior: 11 Guidelines for Social and Behavioral Scientists.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Multilingual Parents' Experiences of an Early Language and Literacy Intervention: A Qualitative Study Using the Behaviour Change Wheel.Folia phoniatrica et logopaedica : official organ of the International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics (IALP) · 2026Article
- ChildLens: An egocentric video dataset for activity analysis in children.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Cascading periods of language-related brain plasticity across early childhood.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Child-Directed Speech Facilitates Semantic Role Learning: A Machine Learning Approach.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Children with speech and language delay aged 2-10 Years in Palestine: A case-control study of socio-demographic, biological, familial, and environmental factors.SAGE open medicine · 2026Article
- Automated Analysis of Naturalistic Recordings in Early Childhood: Applications, Challenges, and Opportunities.IEEE signal processing magazine · 2025Article
- Understanding the relationship between child stimulation and brain function using neuroimaging techniques and behavioral measures: a study protocol.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- The cognitive science of language diversity: achievements and challenges.Cognitive processing · 2025Review
- A two-dimensional space of linguistic representations shared across individuals.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 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
- Ethical and epistemic costs of a lack of geographical and cultural diversity in developmental science.Developmental psychology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
13 authors.
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Abstract
Language is a universal human ability, acquired readily by young children, who otherwise struggle with many basics of survival. And yet, language ability is variable across individuals. Naturalistic and experimental observations suggest that children's linguistic skills vary with factors like socioeconomic status and children's gender. But which factors really influence children's day-to-day language use? Here, we leverage speech technology in a big-data approach to report on a unique cross-cultural and diverse data set: >2,500 d-long, child-centered audio-recordings of 1,001 2- to 48-mo-olds from 12 countries spanning six continents across urban, farmer-forager, and subsistence-farming contexts. As expected, age and language-relevant clinical risks and diagnoses predicted how much speech (and speech-like vocalization) children produced. Critically, so too did adult talk in children's environments: Children who heard more talk from adults produced more speech. In contrast to previous conclusions based on more limited sampling methods and a different set of language proxies, socioeconomic status (operationalized as maternal education) was not significantly associated with children's productions over the first 4 y of life, and neither were gender or multilingualism. These findings from large-scale naturalistic data advance our understanding of which factors are robust predictors of variability in the speech behaviors of young learners in a wide range of everyday contexts.
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