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

[Nicholas Thieberger]

There is currently a fieldwork-based project looking at the acquisition of several Australian Indigenous languages, run by Jane Simpson, Patrick McConvell and Gillian Wigglesworth. Its webpage is here:
http://www.linguistics.unimelb.edu.au/research/projects/ACLA/

Nick

At 4:20 PM -0400 10/7/07, William J Poser wrote:
>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
>