Documenting the acquisition of indigenous languages

Abstract

The outstanding property of human language is its diversity, and yet acquisition data is only available for three percent of the world's 6000+ spoken languages. Due to the rapid pace of language loss, it may not be possible to document how children acquire half of the world's indigenous languages in as little as two decades. This loss permanently diminishes the scope of acquisition theory by removing its empirical base. In the face of pervasive language loss, the question of how best to document the language of the last children to acquire indigenous languages assumes critical importance. A collaborative effort by researchers is required to identify the most efficient procedures for documenting children's language, and share them worldwide. This paper makes the case for documenting diversity and outlines steps needed to accomplish this goal.

How diverse is child language acquisition?

“…There are beginnings of movement in this space, but a step change in capacity needed. Pye (2021) argues that one practical and productive way to widen the evidential base is to focus on lexical acquisition in endangered languages. Along similar lines, Defina, et al…”

“…However, if we truly aim to build theories of what it means to be human, we need to ask ourselves whether whole research disciplines that concentrate almost solely on Western Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic societies is an acceptable state of affairs (Heinrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). If it is not, then we need to develop ways to decolonise our discipline to make it more accessible to a greater proportion of the world's population Pye, 2021).…”

On the acquisition of complex predicates: Introduction to the special issue

“…variable case-marking). Kelly et al (2015) and Pye (2021) imply that we have reached a breaking point for the discipline: should we continue to pool resources toward ever-more-fine-grained understanding of acquisition of particular construction types found in English -or should we instead expand our lens to incorporate the urgent, far-reaching documentation of acquisition of under-studied, endangered languages -spoken and signed -around the world, regardless of how they fit into current theoretical niches? For instance, the Nungon language of Papua New Guinea (Sarvasy, 2017) lacks a passive construction, but does feature relative clauses.…”

“…Thus, the 'language-specific' approach to diversifying the field of language acquisition studies targets the acquisition of special features of endangered and under-studied languages, in their own rights. Clause chains, switch-reference, classifiers, grammatical evidentiality, and myriad other un-English-like characteristics of languages around the world are not yet part of the canon discussed in language development textbooks (Pye, 2021). But they can still be studied: to learn, in the first instance, how their acquisition patterns, rather than how they relate to previous studies of the same phenomena.…”

“…Evans and Levinson (2009: 430) called on field linguists to ‘look up from their fascinating particularistic worlds and engage with the larger theoretical issues in the cognitive sciences’. When field linguists heed this call and those of Kelly et al (2015) and Pye (2021), inter alia, to report on child acquisition of under-studied languages, scholars of language acquisition should similarly be roused from their canon of passives and relative clauses (among other things, of course) to countenance the range of other features that children acquire in the world’s languages. In other words, the language-specific approach will necessarily expand the grammatical topics covered in acquisition research.…”