ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Infants who are rarely spoken to nevertheless understand many words.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- 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
- Adapting developmental science for a world of diverse families.The Behavioral and brain sciences · 2026Article
- The evolution of infant-directed communication: Comparing vocal input across all great apes.Science advances · 2025Article
- Ethical and epistemic costs of a lack of geographical and cultural diversity in developmental science.Developmental psychology · 2025Article
- Children Learn Best From Their Peers: The Crucial Role of Input From Other Children in Language Development.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Bursty, Irregular Speech Input to Children Predicts Vocabulary Size.Developmental science · 2025Article
- Personal pronoun comprehension in addressed and non-addressed situations in autistic and nonautistic preschoolers.Journal of cognition and development : official journal of the Cognitive Development Society · 2025Article
- Enhanced pitch discrimination in autistic children with unexpected bilingualism.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2024Article
- Bilingual Language Input to Infants in Bolivia and the United States.Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant StudiesArticle
- A Contextual Approach to Characterizing Caregiver Responsiveness in a Rural Area of The Gambia.Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant StudiesArticle
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Theories of language development-informed largely by studies of Western, middleclass infants-have highlighted the language that caregivers direct to children as a key driver of language learning. However, some have argued that language development unfolds similarly across environmental contexts, including those in which childdirected language is scarce. This raises the possibility that children are able to learn from other sources of language in their environments, particularly the language directed to others in their environment. We explore this hypothesis with infants in an indigenous Tseltal-speaking community in Southern Mexico who are rarely spoken to, yet have the opportunity to overhear a great deal of other-directed language by virtue of being carried on their mothers' backs. Adapting a previously established gaze-tracking method for detecting early word knowledge to our field setting, we find that Tseltal infants exhibit implicit knowledge of common nouns (Exp. 1), analogous to their US peers who are frequently spoken to. Moreover, they exhibit comprehension of Tseltal honorific terms that are exclusively used to greet adults in the community (Exp. 2), representing language that could only have been learned through overhearing. In so doing, Tseltal infants demonstrate an ability to discriminate words with similar meanings and perceptually similar referents at an earlier age than has been shown among Western children. Together, these results suggest that for some infants, learning from overhearing may be an important path toward developing language.
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