Hadza communication · Communication Development in Infants: the Case of the Hadza Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania

Communication Development in Infants: the Case of the Hadza Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania

The ways children learn to communicate verbally and non-verbally depend to a great extent on the culture in which they are raised. Much is known about the social environment of children living in Western societies, and some is known about those living in many non-Western societies, but much less is known about how children are socialized in hunter-gatherer societies. The objective of the proposed project is to gain insights into the development of communication in hunter-gatherer children from the Hadza living in Tanzania. The project’s aims are • to develop a minimally intrusive data collection method that gives access to the learning process by including physiological measures. • to analyze physiological responses to infants’ verbal and non-verbal interactions with their social environment focusing on the Hadza, as a particularly interesting cultural community. • extract patterns in data from diverse sources (audio, video, observation, electrophysiological measures) with automated data mining techniques. The approach is interdisciplinary, integrating methods from anthropology and ethology with modern physiological assessment methods, innovative wearable technology and data mining techniques. It is important to know more about the development of communication in Hadza infants as communication in hunter-gatherers has not been comprehensively studied and the Hadza are a community living in conditions that resemble our ancestors’ living conditions. This helps to shed light on the evolution of language in our species. As hunter-gatherer societies are increasingly threatened due to ecological, economic and political changes in their environment, it is crucial to conduct this research as soon as possible. Using the Multimodal Interaction Recorder for Children (MIRC), a relatively unobtrusive method for collecting daylong interactions between children and their social environment was designed that can record not only speech, but also the relative location of relevant others and heart-rate. The recordings with the MIRC can, indeed, be used to analyse physiological responses to interactional data, but unfortunately no appropriate data mining techniques are currently available to carry out these analyses. Efforts are continued to develop appropriate techniques, but this was not feasible within the scope of the project. However, additional observations using –more traditional– video recordings allowed us to discover various patterns concerning the way children are being addressed verbally and non-verbally. In particular, it was found that the Hadza society is changing rapidly as the result of increased tourism. These changes appear to be related to the way children are being addressed verbally and non-verbally, and which in turn could impact their language development.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union