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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Aug 3, 2025

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody

Published on: September 27, 2024

LANGUAGE EXPOSURE PREDICTS CHILDREN'S PHONETIC PATTERNING: EVIDENCE FROM LANGUAGE SHIFT.

Margaret Cychosz¹

¹University of Maryland, College Park.

|April 10, 2023

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Environmental language exposure significantly impacts children's phonetic development. Differentiating between receptive and expressive language experiences is key to understanding bilingual language acquisition and speech production in shifting communities.

Keywords:

Quechua Spanish field phonetics first language acquisition language shift morphology speech production

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Published on: April 19, 2017

Area of Science:

Developmental linguistics
Sociolinguistics
Phonetics

Background:

Understanding environmental influences is central to language acquisition theory.
The distinction between receptive and expressive language experiences is often overlooked, yet crucial for child speech production.
Phonetic development in children has rarely been studied in relation to environmental factors.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the role of the environment in children's phonetic development within a bilingual community.
To differentiate the impact of receptive versus expressive language experiences on child speech production.
To examine language acquisition in a naturalistic setting of rapid language shift.

Main Methods:

Utilized a large-scale child language corpus (over 500 hours) of South Bolivian Quechua and Spanish.
Efficiently annotated bilingual language use by children and caregivers.
Correlated environmental language exposure estimates with children's performance on speech production tasks.

Main Results:

Environmental role varied by outcome: expressive language experience predicted coarticulation-morphology performance.
Receptive language experience predicted performance on a lower-level vowel variability measure.
Bilingual exposure effects suggest different learning outcomes within a single speech community.

Conclusions:

Environmental factors, specifically the type of language exposure (receptive vs. expressive), play a differential role in children's phonetic development.
Language shift in bilingual communities can lead to diverse learning outcomes.
The study highlights the importance of modeling language exposure accurately in developmental research.