How do languages become learnable for young children? Read our paper out now in Current Biology “Immature vocalizations elicit simplified adult speech across multiple languages” to find out! 🧵 of our findings below: https://t.co/lfIapXPCyT 1/9

We found a non-obvious pathway to robust language learnability across cultures & languages. Future work will assess just how widespread this pathway is across the world’s languages, and the role that contingent simplification plays in language development. 9/9

Languages don't only become learnable over evolution, they’re also learnable at precise moments during language development. Children actively shape their own learning input, eliciting learnable speech during vocal turn-taking, the central context of language use. 8/9

Languages must be learnable by the next generation otherwise they would not exist. Here we show the simplification effect is robust across languages, contexts, and types of social interaction. Contingent simplified speech may be a cross-linguistic key to language learnability 7/9

What this cross-cultural robustness implies is that the simplification effect of contingent speech is likely to be present in many more language than the 13 we studied in this paper. 6/9

A language we studied in this paper—Tseltal Mayan—was a particularly useful test case because Tseltal caregivers don’t use exaggerated child-directed speech typically found in industrialized societies. Despite this, we found a robust simplification in Tseltal caregiver speech 5/9

Only parental speech that was contingent (produced immediately following their children’s vocalizations) was simplified, even though both contingent and non-contingent speech were similar in child-directed exaggerated pitch. 4/9

In response to their child’s immature speech, caregivers produce fewer unique words, shorter utterances and more single-word utterances compared to caregivers’ baseline speech complexity. We call this the simplification effect of contingent speech. 3/9

w/ @MikeHGoldstein & @levy_jacob we show that kid’s immature vocalizations & speech actively elicit language from caregivers that is linguistically simplified & learnable. We find this in 13 languages, showing a robust social pathway for making language learning easier to do 2/9

Power of babble: Across languages and cultures, parents simplify their speech in response to babies’ babbling and early speech, supporting language development, @CornellPsychDpt research finds. @CornellCAS @CurrentBiology @MikeHGoldstein @ElmlingerSteven

.@hv_zhang @ElmlingerSteven @RachelAlbertLVC & @MikeHGoldstein (2024) found caregiver vocal (not multimodal) responses keep infants in vocal turn-taking. Multimodal flexibility in vocal turn-taking may emerge over development #infancypapers

My colleague and collaborator @hv_zhang brought **two** new papers into the world this month. Both explore what keeps prelinguistic infants "in the game" of vocal turn-taking! Check out her thread for an overview of the two papers:

Joint attention is considered one of the key capacities underlying human cooperation. We have studied it non-human primates and domestic animals like dogs, but what about zebras? We investigated whether the headbob (below) is used for joint engagement. https://t.co/2td5Gsv01W

Communication is complex, made all the more so by being fundamentally multimodal. My new paper introduces a framework for using network methods to analyse communication as an interconnected system, using plains zebras as a case study. https://t.co/LbKw0txweb

Deception and scaffolding?

Come see Pablo Contreras Kallens, @pcontrerask a newly-minted PhD 🥳🥳, at CogSci for questions this week @ 7 PM EST / 9 AM AUS on Fri the 28th and Sat the 29th, poster ID: VP-T-557-1812! CogSci paper link:

Additionally, we look forward to more rigorous multi-language measures of articulatory complexity a la Kabakoff et al., 2023 -- these measures have a huge potential to help speech language pathologists and language learners well into the future. /11 https://t.co/NYxJ0Mcm1N

In future research we will employ additional measures of ambient language structure that infants could use to guide their consonant acquisition – stay tuned for the full-length 📜 to come! /10

In Japanese, Korean and Spanish, articulatory complexity accounts for variance in children’s age of consonant acquisition, but to a lesser extent than is seen in English, suggesting that consonant learning trajectories do not follow a uniform cross-linguistic progression. /9

As the Kent AC measure was handcrafted for English, our models naturally result in a high degree of variance in English-learning children’s age of consonant acquisition being explained by AC. Does AC explain non-English-learning consonant trajectories? /8