Infrequent Child-Directed Speech Is Bursty and May Draw Infant Vocalizations

ArXi:2603.23797v1 Announce Type: new Children in many parts of the world hear relatively little speech directed to them, yet still reach major language development milestones. What differs about the speech input that infants learn from when directed input is rare? Using longform, infant-centered audio recordings taken in rural Bolivia and the urban U. S., we examined temporal patterns of infants' speech input and their pre-linguistic vocal behavior. We find that child-directed speech in Bolivia, though less frequent, was just as temporally clustered as speech input in the U.