How do children learn to speak the language(s) of their families and communities? Existing research emphasizes the important role that child-directed speech (CDS), or direct, one-on-one language input from a caregiver (usually a parent) to a child, plays in language acquisition. Yet almost all of this work focuses on children in Western contexts where CDS is the cultural norm. Less is known about the role that other-directed speech (ODS), between adults or older children, may play in the process of early language acquisition. In the context of contemporary Maya families from the Yucatan peninsula, Learning by Observing and Pitching In (Rogoff et al., 2014) has been proposed as a model of informal learning in which children are considered an important part of daily activities and learn through attentive engagement with adults in multigenerational settings. How might the LOPI framework apply to language learning? This project aims to study variability in patterns of language learning in diverse cultural contexts and inform ongoing language maintenance efforts in this region of Mexico. 

If today is Wednesday, is tomorrow “this Thursday” or “next Thursday”? Do you picture time moving linearly from left to right? Or in a never ending circle like a zodiac calendar? Or in layers with the past providing the foundation and the future reaching up into the sky? Mental representations of time vary across cultures and there are seemingly infinite ways that languages can encode time to express events that will happen, have happened, or are happening. Telicity is a grammatical aspect indicating whether an event is conceptualized as having an endpoint (telic) or not (atelic). It is a mystery why telicity is reflected in the syntax of some languages but not others. In Finnish, there is an obligatory contrast between a resultative (complete) and irresultative (incomplete) action. In English, telicity can be indicated either semantically or syntactically and interpretation may be influenced by event structure and objects involved. For instance, “he drank beer” is an ongoing action with no clear quantity or endpoint, but “he drank a beer” involves a countable noun and an ostensive ending. In Spanish, the imperfect verb tense can be used for descriptions of past events or actions without a specific endpoint in time (corría) compared with events with a clear end (corrí). Yucatec Maya is thought to be a “tenseless” language, but time is nonetheless expressed in many ways through the context. Do we map our concepts of time onto the languages we learn or are events represented universally and then described in language-specific ways? 

¡Totopos y sikil p'aak! When you sit down to eat at a Yucatecan restaurant, chances are that you will be served the house-made sikil p'aak – a delicious dip made from pepitas (pumpkin seeds or sikil in maya) blended with tomatoes (p'aak), lime, salt, and habanero peppers. Every restaurant prepares it slightly differently and the recipe is easy enough to try at home too! 

Mérida is a circular city that spreads from the Centro to the Periférico. It can be traversed via one-way streets laid out on a grid that is superimposed on top of radial spokes extending outward like a sunflower starfish. Although there are a few semáforos, mostly there are stop signs which seem to be suggestions. When approaching a blind intersection,  drivers who have the right-of-way will do a gentle double-tap on the horn to alert the cars at the stop sign to wait. They call this maneuver "pitar o sonar el claxon" (to beep or sound the horn). I love the word claxon. Apparently the root is from the Greek, I shriek, which feels apt. The term klaxon refers to a horn or alerting device and is used widely for imminent danger alerting systems (e.g., seismic activity). It has also made its way into many lexical systems across the globe besides Spanish to refer to the car horn like Japanese and Korean!

What would you call the objects you use to turn on your shower? Knobs? Handles? Something totally different? I learned three different Spanish vocabulary words for shower handle/knob today. El mango is used for un objeto para asir (an object to grab), primarily for objects with affordances for grasping or grabbing like a long, linear pot/pan handle; la manija is a handle more often used in the case of a drawer pull; and la perilla is a knob with a characteristic round shape. All of these words were used to describe the knobs in our Airbnb shower! Why? Because they don't fit neatly into a category! They have a round base, but a protruding handle! This is a great example of cross-linguistic categorization. The way we carve up and label the objects and events in our world sometimes aligns across languages, but sometimes we have totally different conceptual categories and corresponding labels (read Soonja Choi's fascinating paper on Korean and English spatial prepositions for more)!