Linguistic diversity in first language acquisition research: Moving beyond the challenges

Abstract

The field of first language acquisition (FLA) needs to take into account data from the broadest typological array of languages and language-learning environments if it is to identify potential universals in child language development, and how these interact with socio-cultural mechanisms of acquisition. Yet undertaking FLA research in remote fieldbased situations, where the majority of the world's languages are spoken and acquired, poses challenges for best-practice methodologies assumed in lab-based FLA research. This article discusses the challenges of child language acquisition research in fieldwork contexts with lesser-known, under-described languages with small communities of speakers. The authors suggest some modified approaches to methodology for child language research appropriate to challenging fieldwork situations, in the hope of encouraging more cross-linguistic acquisition research.

Activity types and child-directed speech: a comparison between French, Tunisian Arabic and English

“…The above-mentioned studies generally link the behaviour of dyads at a given time to later language and cognitive development of children. A different line of research has focused on a given linguistic feature of language development, for example the nouns bias (Choi 2000, Kern et al 2012, Altınkamış et al 2014), or on mothers' conversational style (Bornstein et al 1992, Haden and Fivush 1996, Kloth et al 1998, Flynn and Masur 2007, Golinkoff et al 2015, Kelly et al 2015) in order to track variation or show stability across contexts. Such studies have shown, for instance, that mothers used more action-oriented utterances and hence more verbs in toy-play contexts than in book-reading contexts (Kern et al 2012).…”

The development of possession in the L1 acquisition of Northern East Cree

“…The acquisition of polysynthetic languages As others have noted (e.g., Forshaw, 2016;Kelly, Forshaw, Nordlinger, & Wigglesworth, 2015;Kelly, Wigglesworth, Nordlinger, & Blythe, 2014), polysynthetic languages are under-represented in language acquisition research. This gap entails problems for the scientific understanding of first-language acquisition, because one cannot assume what holds for acquiring languages such as English also holds for languages with much different morphosyntax.…”

The Acquisition of Murrinhpatha (Northern Australia)

“…The variation in sample size between participants raises issues for the comparability of data across participants. This is a common issue for acquisition studies, particularly for lesser-known languages where building an extensive corpus is often difficult (Kelly et al 2015). This issue has been addressed recently in a number of different ways in order to aid statistical analyses (e.g.…”