Mahesh Srinivasan, “Understanding variation in children’s early language environments and learning strategies”

In this talk, I will present recent work from my lab that addresses two broad claims within the field of language development: First, that there are "optimal" methods for speaking to one's child; and second, that parents from lower socioeconomic-status backgrounds sometimes lack knowledge of these methods, thus warranting parenting training. I will begin by presenting studies that address whether the experience of poverty itself—above and beyond factors like parenting knowledge or effort—may suppress parents' speech to their children. Our findings suggest that financial scarcity may impact how anybody would speak to their child, motivating the need for policies that address systemic inequities. Next, I will discuss our research which assesses children's ability to learn from overheard speech (ambient speech that is not directed to a child), which is a main form of children's early experience with language in many communities around the world. Our findings suggest that infants from a Mayan community in Mexico who are not frequently spoken to nevertheless understand many words (analogous to their North American peers who are frequently spoken to), including words that could only be learned by overhearing. This work suggests that language learning may be robust across diverse environmental contexts in part because children are flexible in how they learn. I will discuss ongoing and future work, and the theoretical and practical implications of these lines of work.