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Input to the language learning infant: The impact of other children
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Description: Language environments of children vary strongly within and across cultures. Here, we explore the impact on infants' attention to a relatively unexplored type of input: the speech of other children. We ask whether infants attend differently to child speech, child-surrounding adult speech and child-directed speech. In Study 1, we compared how infants growing up in two different cultural contexts (Shipibo-Konibo, Peruvian Amazon and Swiss German, urban Switzerland) attend to child speech compared to surrounding adult speech. Using a head-turn paradigm we find that infants in both cultures paid more attention to child speech than adult speech, independent of the stimuli language (Swiss German vs. Shipibo-Konibo). In Study 2, we tested whether child speech in Swiss German has a similar effect on infants' attention as the well-established effect of child-directed speech. We used the same experimental setup as in Study 1 and found that Swiss infants were equally attentive to child speech as to child-directed speech. Together, these findings indicate that regardless of cultural differences, speech of children effectively captivates the attention of infants and could play a role in language development similar to child-directed speech.
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