Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study sketches the language environments of children ages 0;03;0 growing up in two traditional, indigenous com-munities: one Tseltal (Mayan) and the other Yl (Papuan). Past ethnographic work has suggested that caregivers’ ideasabout talking to young children differ greatly between these two communities. However, the present daylong recordinganalyses suggest that, in fact, children are rarely directly addressed in both places, with no age-related increase and withmost child-directed speech coming from adults. Children’s manual activities also suggest that child-carrying practicesand cultural context moderate the extent to which children might use co-occurrence between held objects and ambientlanguage to learn words.