Community-set goals are needed to increase diversity in language acquisition research: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022)

Havron, Naomi; Scaff, Camila; Hitczenko, Kasia; Cristià, Alejandrina

doi:10.31219/osf.io/u7w6t

Cited by 2 publications

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“…A second theme that ran through several commentaries was an apparent tension between the scientific enterprise of child language research versus the beneficiaries of our work. This was most explicitly articulated by Henke (2022), but was also addressed by Foushee and Casillas (2022) and Havron et al (2022). We agree with Henke on the importance of broader impact of research, especially if that research is on low-resource languages, and particularly if the language is spoken by traditionally marginalised groups.…”

Section: For Whom Do We Conduct Research?mentioning

confidence: 57%

“…As some commentators pointed out (Foushee & Casillas, 2022; Havron et al, 2022; Slobin, 2022), the number of languages for which we have data is so low that the solution cannot simply be to roll up our sleeves and get to work. Indeed, borrowing from Havron et al’s (2022) commentary, any solution must be SMART (i.e.…”

Section: Moving Forwardmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…However, there are many languages spoken by minority and often marginalised communities that do not have state support, and which stand to benefit more from knowledge of how children acquire their languages and the contexts in which they acquire it. Havron et al (2022) raise the important issue of not falling into colonialistic traps in our attempts to promote research on understudied languages. There is a growing literature on the decolonisation of linguistics (e.g.…”

Section: Moving Forwardmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Where to from here? Increasing language coverage while building a more diverse discipline

Kidd

Garcia

2022

First Language

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Our original target article highlighted some significant shortcomings in the current state of child language research: a large skew in our evidential base towards English and a handful of other Indo-European languages that partly has its origins in a lack of researcher diversity. In this article, we respond to the 21 commentaries on our original article. The commentaries highlighted both the importance of attention to typological features of languages and the environments and contexts in which languages are acquired, with many commentators providing concrete suggestions on how we address the data skew. In this response, we synthesise the main themes of the commentaries and make suggestions for how the field can move towards both improving data coverage and opening up to traditionally under-represented researchers.

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Section: For Whom Do We Conduct Research?mentioning

confidence: 57%

Section: Moving Forwardmentioning

confidence: 88%

Section: Moving Forwardmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Where to from here? Increasing language coverage while building a more diverse discipline

Kidd

Garcia

2022

First Language

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Learning to predict and predicting to learn: Before and beyond the syntactic bootstrapper

Babineau

Havron

Dautriche

et al. 2022

Language Acquisition

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Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the semantic seed hypothesis, children discover the semantic predictiveness of syntactic contexts by tracking the distribution of familiar words. We propose that these learning mechanisms relate to a larger cognitive model: the predictive processing framework. According to this model, we perceive and make sense of the world by constantly predicting what will happen next in a probabilistic fashion. We outline evidence that prediction operates within language acquisition, and show how this framework helps us understand the way lexical knowledge refines syntactic predictions and how syntactic knowledge refines predictions about novel words' meanings. The predictive processing framework entails that learners can adapt to recent information and update their linguistic model. Here we review some of the recent experimental work showing that the type of prediction preschool children make from a syntactic context can change when they are presented with convincing contrary evidence from recent input. We end by discussing some challenges of applying the predictive processing framework to syntactic bootstrapping and propose new avenues to investigate in future work.

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Community-set goals are needed to increase diversity in language acquisition research: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022)

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Where to from here? Increasing language coverage while building a more diverse discipline

Where to from here? Increasing language coverage while building a more diverse discipline

Learning to predict and predicting to learn: Before and beyond the syntactic bootstrapper

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