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

[William J Poser]

My impression is that L1 acquisition studies have unfortunately been
focussed very heavily on a small number of languages, due in large
part to the fact that it is quite difficult to study acquisition
in the field - people tend to study their own children or children
readily accessible in the vicinity of their university. So there is
tons of work on English, French, and German, and a good bit on
Hebrew and Turkish (which, when it started, was itself part of an
effort to broaden the range of languages), but much less on other
languages. For example, I know of exactly one study of L1
acquisition of Navajo. An additional problem is of course that
in the case of endangered languages there are no children acquiring
the language to study.

The expert on the study of L1 aquisition of "exotic" languages is
Cliff Pye at the University of Kansas (http://web.ku.edu/~pyersqr/)
He himself has worked on acquisition of Mayan languages. He has
also written about the need for studies of acquisition in a wider
range of languages and cultures.

Bill