Learning a mother tongue : A universal process ?

How do children learn their mother tongue? This question has been the subject of few studies conducted outside of industrialized countries. At the Laboratoire de sciences cognitives et psycholinguistique (CNRS/ENS/EHESS), specialists in language development in children have studied a traditional population in the Bolivian Amazon, the Tsimane¹, in partnership with bio-anthropologists from Toulouse 1 Capitole University² and the University of California at Santa Barbara. Their study, published on November 2, 2017 in the journal Child Development , shows that, on average, less than one minute per hour is spent talking to children under the age of four. This is up to ten times less than for children of the same age in industrialized countries. This observation should prompt us to conduct more studies of this kind in various cultures in order to verify if the process of learning a mother tongue is universal. In all human cultures, it takes little effort for children to learn the language(s) spoken by those around them. Although this process has fascinated several generations of specialists, it remains poorly understood.