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

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
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.
Keywords: activity context, language environment, child-directed speech, language acquisition, Daylong Audio Recordings
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 efforts 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
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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