Talking in Timor-Leste: urbanization, peer input, and other influences on children's verbal environments
Abstract
Children's early experiences with language are influenced by socioeconomic and cultural factors that vary greatly across societies. By expanding the geographical diversity of language acquisition studies, researchers are able to answer broader questions about mechanisms linking children’s speech input to their learning process. We present a large-scale study of 277 children between 11-58 months old growing up in Timor-Leste, an island nation in Southeast Asia. Children were drawn from households in 72 villages comprising both rural and urban communities. We used child-worn audio recorders combined with an open-source speaker diarization software to quantify their verbal input and production throughout the day. Our analysis found that children were exposed to 15 minutes of verbal input per hour total, mostly from other children and female adults. Of total input, 6 min/hour were produced during conversational exchanges with the child. Children from rural communities heard more adult vocalizations and vocalized more often than those sampled from urban communities. Older children and children with more siblings were exposed to more input from other children and vocalized more often themselves. Higher maternal education was associated with fewer child vocalizations. After adjusting for speaker misclassification, child vocalizations were significantly associated with input from other children and female adults. Our study indicates that verbal input from other children may be especially important in Timorese homes, and suggests that a positive relationship between education and adult input may not be universal. These results affirm the usefulness of long-form audio analysis for educators and policymakers interested in children’s early learning environments.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{coffey2026talking,
title = {{Talking in Timor-Leste: urbanization, peer input, and other influences on children's verbal environments}},
author = {Joseph Coffey and Victoria Baranov and Xinran Hu and Diana Contreras Suarez and Lisa Cameron and Alejandrina Cristia},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/5s3jb_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5s3jb_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Talking in Timor-Leste: urbanization, peer input, and other influences on children's verbal environments
AU - Joseph Coffey
AU - Victoria Baranov
AU - Xinran Hu
AU - Diana Contreras Suarez
AU - Lisa Cameron
AU - Alejandrina Cristia
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/06
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/5s3jb_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5s3jb_v1/
AB - Children's early experiences with language are influenced by socioeconomic and cultural factors that vary greatly across societies. By expanding the geographical diversity of language acquisition studies, researchers are able to answer broader questions about mechanisms linking children’s speech input to their learning process. We present a large-scale study of 277 children between 11-58 months old growing up in Timor-Leste, an island nation in Southeast Asia. Children were drawn from households in 72 villages comprising both rural and urban communities. We used child-worn audio recorders combined with an open-source speaker diarization software to quantify their verbal input and production throughout the day. Our analysis found that children were exposed to 15 minutes of verbal input per hour total, mostly from other children and female adults. Of total input, 6 min/hour were produced during conversational exchanges with the child. Children from rural communities heard more adult vocalizations and vocalized more often than those sampled from urban communities. Older children and children with more siblings were exposed to more input from other children and vocalized more often themselves. Higher maternal education was associated with fewer child vocalizations. After adjusting for speaker misclassification, child vocalizations were significantly associated with input from other children and female adults. Our study indicates that verbal input from other children may be especially important in Timorese homes, and suggests that a positive relationship between education and adult input may not be universal. These results affirm the usefulness of long-form audio analysis for educators and policymakers interested in children’s early learning environments.
ER -