Introduction to the special issue on the acquisition of Mesoamerican languages: The case of Mayan languages and Chatino sign language

Mesoamerican (MA) languages are spoken in the historical–cultural area known as Mesoamerica located between Northern Mexico and Central America. These languages comprise 10 language families (including 3 language isolates; Campbell, 2016, p. 114). ¹ They share a number of linguistic features, such as head-marking, verb-initial and verb-final constituent orders, numeral, nominal and possessive constructions, directionals, relational nouns, and rich aspectual and modal systems. With the exception of the Otomanguean branch, which comprises a large collection of tonal languages, a prominent typological feature of MA languages is polysynthesis, which involves morphological marking of syntactic relations at the word level. This collection of linguistic features poses interesting challenges to children acquiring these languages. Furthermore, recent studies have also identified emerging sign languages (Haviland, 2022; Horton et al., 2023; Hou, 2024; LeGuen, 2019, among others), which present their own particularities related with the linguistic and cultural environments in which they are created, used, and learned by children. Oral MA languages are understudied, endangered, and no longer learnt by children in many communities. This is due to sustained language contact with Spanish since colonial times to the present day, in addition to prevailing ideologies that undervalue them. Emerging signed MA languages are also understudied and subject to pervasive oralist ideologies that discriminate against them, even in their own community of origin.

The articles in this special issue focus on how children acquire some of the MA linguistic features with a special emphasis on Mayan languages. We also include an article on children’s use of an emerging sign language of deaf Chatino people in the San Juan Quiahije municipality in Oaxaca, Mexico.

The Mayan languages are historically spoken in the south of Mexico and Northern Central America and consist of 30 languages. They share some of the major traits of MA languages: head-marking, inalienable and alienable possession, relational nouns instead of prepositions, classificatory systems, and directionals, among other features (Campbell et al., 1986). They also have specific traits such as ergativity and a special class of ‘positional roots’ with high productive morphology. The main six branches are Huastecan, Yucatecan, Q’anjobalan and Ch’olan-Tzeltalan (western branch), and Mamean and Quichean (eastern branch).

The Mayan language family is one of the most documented in MA linguistics, including adult and child grammars (Brown et al., 2013; de León, 1998, 1999a, 1999b, 2001, 2022; Mateo Pedro, 2015; Pfeiler et al., 2003; Pye et al., 2007). Topics in the acquisition of Mayan languages that have attracted interest in relation to theories of language acquisition include baby talk or motherese, phonological development, early lexical acquisition, lexical bias theories, ergativity, benefactive, and passive constructions, among others (see Pye et al., 2017, for an overview of the acquisition of Mayan languages).

This special issue includes studies of Tseltal and Tsotsil from the Tzeltalan-Ch’olan branch; Yucatec from the Yucatecan branch, Mam (eastern branch), and Q’anjob’al from the Q’anjob’alan branch (western branch). Altogether, these articles address several topics of relevance for MA language acquisition and socialization, including: multigenerational input (de León & Avelino Sierra, 2024), early verb bias (Casillas et al., 2024), verb compounds and prosody (Pye, 2024), directionals (Mateo Pedro, 2024), evidentials (Dzidz Yam & Pfeiler, 2024), and bilingualism and cognition in spatial orientation (Chi Pech, 2024). The article on Chatino sign language is among the few studies documenting emerging child sign languages in an MA community (Hou, 2024; see LeGuen, 2019).

Each article is based on child data collected by using one of four methods: case studies, longitudinal, cross-sectional, and experimental. The article of Chatino Sign Language is based on a case study of a family (Hou, 2024). The studies of Mam (Pye), Q’anjobal (Mateo Pedro), and Yucatec (Didz Yam & Pfeilier) are based on longitudinal case studies with naturalistic child data. The articles on Tseltal (Casillas et al., 2024) and Tsotsil (de León & Avelino Sierra, 2024) are based on cross-sectional data from children’s spontaneous productions. Finally, Chi Pech presents the only cross-sectional experimental article using specific stimuli to assess bilingualism and cognition in Yucatec middle-aged children.

Several authors have a long history of working on the acquisition of Indigenous languages of Mesoamerica (Brown, de León, Mateo Pedro, Pfeiler, and Pye). Some authors are speakers of their own MA languages (Chi, Dzidz Yam, and Mateo Pedro). The author of the article on Chatino Sign Language is a deaf signer (Hou).

Overall, the special issue integrates several disciplinary approaches from linguistics, developmental psychology, and linguistic anthropology offering a rich array of perspectives on MA language development.

Overview of articles

The first article by de León and Avelino Sierra (2024) presents the first study that documents child-directed speech (CDS) in multigenerational families in the MA area. CDS from multiple caregivers is characteristic of many MA communities, but has been overlooked given the predominance of CDS studies with mother–child dyads in middle-class urban studies. Studies on the acquisition of Mayan and other Indigenous languages have shown that CDS occurs infrequently (Brown, 1998; Casillas et al., 2020; de León, 1998; Pfeiler, 2007). However, de León and Avelino argue Sierra that no previous studies have evaluated the effect of the quality of input from extended family members on language acquisition. They also contend that CDS occurs in specific communicative events aimed at socializing the child to engage with others through a collection of interactional routines or formats.

By applying both qualitative and quantitative methods, de León and Avelino Sierra (2024) evaluate the interactional formats (IFs) in the child-directed communication of four children acquiring Tsotsil Mayan (mean age: 15 months) in communicative events within their multigenerational family, consisting of an average of seven members, including grandparents, siblings, uncles/aunts. The IFs identified from a pragmatic analysis of the dataset include directives, prompting, teasing, referential, regulatory, and evaluation. The results show that input from multigenerational caregivers exceeds that from parents. Results also show a statistically significant correlation between IF types and communicative events, as well as between IF types and caregivers’ CDC, highlighting the value of a mixed-methods approach.

The authors suggest that studies of CDS, especially in Indigenous communities, should focus on multigenerational caregivers rather than solely on parental caregivers, which has been the norm in non-Indigenous societies. In addition, attention should be given to the interactional and pragmatic functions of CDS in specific communicative events and not only to isolated words and grammatical items.

The article by Casillas et al. (2024) proposes a novel approach to testing theories of learning bias in early lexical development from the perspective of Tseltal Mayan acquisition. The authors test the so-called noun-bias theory, which claims that nouns (specifically concrete and animate) universally dominate early vocabularies due to their conceptual accessibility (Gentner, 1982). This topic has been central to the noun-bias debate in Mayan languages (Brown, 1998 for Tseltal, and de León, 1998, 1999a, 1999b for Tsotsil), and the study by Casillas et al. is the first one to combine different analytical methodologies with the largest existing transcription collection of everyday Tseltal speech (Casillas, 2023).

To this end, the authors analyze spontaneous day-long recordings of 29 Tseltal learners between 0;9 ² and 4;4 to evaluate previous Tseltal findings from two approaches: (1) proportional frequency measures (e.g. the proportion of noun types and noun-verb ratio) that include spontaneous speech data and a vocabulary checklist, and (2) the relative representation approach used with spontaneous speech of transcribed data. They argue in favor of the latter method, as it focuses on unbiased development before addressing a learning bias. Results from the proportional frequency analysis reveal that 21 out of 29 children show both noun under-representation and verb over-representation.

The authors argue that the novel method of relative representation, based on a large sample of transcribed data, reveals a numerical trend toward verb over-representation in Tseltal children’s cumulative vocabularies. Finally, the authors propose to expand the scope and generality of the object-specific biases in early lexical learning to include linguistic and cultural factors that may influence children’s conceptual accessibility through encultured practices of attention to actions and activities. The combination of analytical measures by Casillas and colleagues shows the value and complementarity of small-scale case studies (Brown, 1998; de León, 1999a, 1999b) with large-scale spontaneous data involving a larger number of children.

Mateo Pedro (2024) researches the acquisition of directionals and their associated motion forms (auxiliaries and motion verbs) in Q’anjobal. These grammatical resources have been of interest in cognitive linguistics, typology, and cross-linguistic language acquisition (Bowerman, 1994, p. 43).

In Mayan languages, directionals result from the grammaticalization of motion intransitive verbs. Motion intransitive verbs take inflection of aspect, agreement, and status suffixes, while directionals take a suffix. Previous studies in Mayan languages report that children acquire verbs starting with the verb root and a status suffix (Mateo Pedro, 2015; Pye et al., 2007). Pye and Pfeiler (2019) studied the acquisition of directionals in K’iche’ and Mam. They found that in Mam, children produce directionals before the main verb, while in K’iche’ children produce directionals after the main verb, consistent with adult grammar.

Mateo Pedro’s study is based on spontaneous longitudinal study of two monolingual Q’anjob’al children: Xhuw (1;9–2;5) and Xhim (2;3–3;5). He evaluated whether children distinguish motion intransitive verbs from directionals and if they acquire the distribution and sequence of directionals as in adult grammar. Results show that children acquire directionals parallel to motion verbs around the same age. Despite the omission of aspect and person marking, these children produce different suffixes to distinguish motion intransitive verbs from directionals. In addition, they produce chains of directionals following the same pattern as adults’ grammar.

The variation observed in the acquisition of directionals in Mayan languages illustrates that children are sensitive to the specific Mayan language that they are exposed to when acquiring motion verbs. While this finding pertains to the Mayan family, Bowerman (1994) has also shown that this pattern has been found in the acquisition of motion verbs in different languages such as English and Korean.

Pye (2024) evaluates the acquisition of the verb complex in Mam, a Mayan language of Guatemala by analyzing spontaneous child data of three children. The author examines how children navigate a multidimensional morphophonemic space to manage the various competing factors that realize each verb complex. Pye tests five predictions derived from the prosodic approach.

The results show that the prosodic approach predicts the children’s production of the verb root following the minimal word constraint, production of ergative morphemes with vowel-initial verbs more than with consonant-initial verbs, production of directional suffixes more frequently than preverbal directionals, and production of directional suffixes more than person clitics. However, the prosodic approach fails to predict the children’s omission of many instances of dependent and imperative suffixes. Based on the results, Pye suggests that when studying the acquisition of morphosyntax one should not ignore the acquisition of prosody.

Although the prosodic approach successfully predicts some parts of the verb complex in Mam, Pye argues that this approach falls short in predicting the contracted forms of the verb complex in Mam. Therefore, it needs further revision to make the right predictions for the acquisition of the verb complex in Mam. Thus, evidence from the acquisition of Mam offers a clear test between syntactic, semantic, and prosodic determinants of inflectional development. In addition, Pye confirms findings reported on the acquisition of the verb complex morphology in other Mayan languages, noting the early production of the verb root plus the status suffix (Pye et al., 2007).

Dzidz Yam and Pfeiler (2024) argue that in previous studies of Yucatec Mayan acquisition with 2-year-olds from a guided observation routine, caregivers use the reportative BIN with imperatives and prompts to gain the child’s attention (Pfeiler, 2012; Pfeiler & Curiel, 2021). However, according to the authors, these studies lack data from interactional contexts that evidence the extensive range of meanings and functions of BIN as reportative in child language.

In this study, Dzidz Yam and Pfeiler (2024) evaluate the acquisition of the reportative BIN by exploring spontaneous child data in Yucatec Mayan from 4-year-old children and their interactions in pretend play and imaginative speech. The child data come from two varieties of Yucatec Mayan, from Yucatán and Quintana Roo. In the literature on Yucatec Mayan, BIN is used as a reportative and an evidential. Although this form is considered optional or rarely found in the adult grammar of Yucatec Mayan (AnderBois, 2019), the authors argue that without it, the sentence would be a kind of declarative utterance. However, with the use of BIN as an evidential marker, it provides emphasis on given information. This is precisely what the results of this study show. Furthermore, the authors argue that BIN does not only mark evidentiality in the Yucatec Maya child data, but also plays a role in the child’s socialization into the Yucatecan Maya language and culture.

The article by Chi Pech (2024) evaluates the pattern of thinking of children acquiring Yucatec and Spanish within the linguistic relativity approach. The study included three groups of children: 12 bilingual children in Yucatec and Spanish, 9 monolingual children in Yucatec, and 3 monolingual children in Spanish from the Yucatan peninsula. The author compared whether there was a cognitive difference between bilingual children in Yucatec and Spanish and monolingual children in Yucatec and Spanish. Two grammatical domains were evaluated: number marking and spatial frames of reference. The study also evaluated whether factors, such as language status, social community, and language of assessment, have effects on such cognitive difference. The results show that the cognitive responses of bilingual children in Yucatec and Spanish are similar to those of monolingual children in Yucatec, which is different from the responses of monolingual children in Spanish.

Furthermore, the results show that in number marking there was an effect of the language assessment but not language status or social community. In contrast, for spatial frames of reference, there was an effect of language status and social community, but not assessment of language. This study is a tremendous contribution to the small body of research in bilingual children who speak both a predominant European language and an Indigenous language.

Finally Hou (2024) presents results of her research of children signing practices of deaf Chatino people in the San Juan Quiahije municipality in Oaxaca, Mexico. She discusses the case study of one signing family who uses ‘making hands’, an emic term for the signing practices of deaf Chatino people and their families. The family of the case study consists of a first-generation adult signer and two second-generation child signers, aged 4;6 and 5;3.

The case study also offers insight about input and socialization for the children’s usage of directional verbs in this emerging sign language. It also provides evidence about the sociocultural process of language learning in the context of an MA (Chatino) ecology. This ecology is configured by shared cultural beliefs, understandings, and practices in relation to the development of linguistic and sociocultural competence in children. In this MA context, children are expected to learn how to use language appropriately through a combination of observation (overseeing/overhearing in multiparty communication; de León, 1998, 2012) and child-directed input from other children and adults.

The author argues that the children’s use of pointing constructions and directional verbs in this small-scale sign language is grounded in local understandings and shared knowledge of the allocation of goods. This shared knowledge encompasses conventional linguistic knowledge, community-based knowledge (e.g. background knowledge of community members), and discourse context. This study represents an important contribution to a scarcely researched field of emerging MA sign languages in the child population.

Conclusion

Oral and signed MA languages represent an important but largely understudied sample of the world’s languages. With this special issue, we aim to advance research on this set of languages, but also to contribute to the study of the acquisition of lesser-studied and typologically diverse languages in small-scale communities.

The articles of this special issue expand on topics of multigenerational input, theories of learning biases, morphosyntax and prosody, directionals and motion verbs, bilingualism and cognition, and emerging sign languages within their specific MA cultural contexts. The unique typological traits, communicative ecologies, and cultural environments in which these languages are learnt offer opportunities to test theories and raise new questions in language acquisition and language socialization studies. However, this special issue covers only a limited range of topics and languages, indicating the need for future research. We hope this collection of articles encourages other scholars to document and study the acquisition of Indigenous languages of other language families in Mesoamerica and beyond.