Language environment and early language production in Slovenian infants: An exploratory study using daylong recordings

Abstract

Daylong recordings provide an ecologically valid option for analyzing language input, and have become a central method for studying child language development. However, the vast majority of this work has been conducted in North America. We harnessed a unique collection of daylong recordings from Slovenian infants (age: 16–30 months, N = 40, 18 girls), and focus our attention on manually annotated measures of parentese (infant-directed speech with a higher pitch, slower tempo, and exaggerated intonation), conversational turns, infant words, and word combinations. Measures from daylong recordings showed large variation, but were comparable to previous studies with North American samples. Infants heard almost twice as much speech and parentese from mothers compared to fathers, but there were no differences in language input to boys and girls. Positive associations were found between the social-interactional features of language input (parentese, turn-taking) and infants' concurrent language production. Measures of child speech from daylong recordings were positively correlated with measures obtained through the Slovenian MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. These results support the notion that the social-interactional features of parental language input are the foundation of infants' language skills, even in an environment where infants spend much of their waking hours in childcare settings, as they do in Slovenia.