Is anyone aware of research concerning ambient audio and language learning?

[William J Poser]

I'm guessing that what you mean by "a sound space" and "ambient audio and
language" is playing stuff in a language as "background music"? If that
is right, I would note two things:

(a) there is evidence that children learning their first language
    begin to acquire its sound system before they exhibit any actual
    ability to understand or produce language. This comes from the fact
    that the distribution of sounds produced in "babbling" becomes
    decreasingly random and approaches the distribution of sounds
    in the ambient language. As I recall this takes place VERY early,
    possibly even still in the womb. By the beginning of preschool as
    it is usually defined, this stage is over.

(b) a number of studies of L1 acquisition have shown that children
    pay no attention to speech not directed to them. Their learning
    is based entirely on speech directed to them. This would suggest
    that it would not be useful to provide language simply as
    "background music". However, there are also studies that show that
    in some cultures people very rarely speak to young children. This
    seems weird to people from cultures in which adults and older children
    explicitly try to teach language (e.g. "That's a doggie. Can you say
    'doggie'?") and seems to relatively rare as a cultural behaviour.
    Nonetheless, children in such societies do acquire language.
    I'm not aware of work that attempts to reconcile these two strands
    of research.

Bill