How diverse is child language acquisition research?

Abstract

A comprehensive theory of child language acquisition requires an evidential base that is representative of the typological diversity present in the world’s 7000 or so languages. However, languages are dying at an alarming rate, and the next 50 years represents the last chance we have to document acquisition in many of them. Here, we take stock of the last 45 years of research published in the four main child language acquisition journals: Journal of Child Language, First Language, Language Acquisition and Language Learning and Development. We coded each article for several variables, including (1) participant group (mono vs multilingual), (2) language(s), (3) topic(s) and (4) country of author affiliation, from each journal’s inception until the end of 2020. We found that we have at least one article published on around 103 languages, representing approximately 1.5% of the world’s languages. The distribution of articles was highly skewed towards English and other well-studied Indo-European languages, with the majority of non-Indo-European languages having just one paper. A majority of the papers focused on studies of monolingual children, although papers did not always explicitly report participant group status. The distribution of topics across language categories was more even. The number of articles published on non-Indo-European languages from countries outside of North America and Europe is increasing; however, this increase is driven by research conducted in relatively wealthy countries. Overall, the vast majority of the research was produced in the Global North. We conclude that, despite a proud history of crosslinguistic research, the goals of the discipline need to be recalibrated before we can lay claim to truly a representative account of child language acquisition.

Exploring individual variation in Turkish heritage speakers’ complex linguistic productions: Evidence from discourse markers

“…Therefore, in this study, we try to break down the dichotomy between the monolingual norm and the multilingual exception. This dichotomy is only a perceived reality, considering that most studies in child language acquisition have only addressed English and a few other well-studied Indo-European languages (Kidd & Garcia, 2022). In doing so, we focus on a specific concept of a multilingual community which focalizes the underlying problems and questions, namely the idea of heritage speakers and languages.…”

(Non-)effects of linguistic environment on early stable consonant production: A cross cultural case study

“…While past work on early vocal development has been linguistically diverse (de Boysson- Bardies & Vihman 1991;Kunnari 2003;Fikkert & Levelt 2008;Lee et al 2010;Shneidman & Goldin-Meadow 2012;Weisleder & Fernald 2013;, links between early phonological development, caregiving practices, and everyday language use have yet to be drawn for any rural, Indigenous context. Especially considering that many languages spoken in rural and traditional or Indigenous contexts have typological features underrepresented in developmental research (Kidd & Garcia 2022), exploring the predictive relationship between productions at the pre-lexical and early lexical stages of development in these communities is a key next step for research on language development.…”

Combining observational and experimental approaches to the development of language and communication in rural samples: Opportunities and challenges

“…Discussions regarding the lack of human and linguistic diversity in both developmental psychology (e.g., Singh et al, 2021) and language acquisition research (Kidd & Garcia, 2022;and commentaries) have gained recent prominence and have led to many recommendations for promoting greater diversity in European and Anglo-American samples (Sugden & Moulson, 2015). Meanwhile, discussion on how to extend diversity in other regions and cultural groups has received much less attention.…”