How diverse is child language acquisition?

Abstract

A comprehensive theory of child language acquisition requires an evidential base that is representative of the typological diversity present in the world’s 7,000 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 approximately half of them. In the current paper 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 the following variables: (i) language(s), (ii) topic(s), and (iii) 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 only around 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 published on non-Indo-European languages having just one paper. There was a more even distribution of topics across language categories, but a vast majority of the research was produced in the Global North. 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. 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 a truly representative account of child language acquisition.

Toward a Comparative Approach to Language Acquisition

“…The dominance of English (vs. non-English Germanic, Romance, and other languages) in the study of language acquisition as exemplified by (from left to right) the proportion of individual words from each language group in child-directed speech in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000), the proportion of babies acquiring a language in each group in the ManyBabies replication study of the effect of infant-directed speech (The ManyBabies Consortium, 2020), and the proportion of articles targeting a language in each group in four key language-acquisition journals (Kidd & Garcia, in press). …”

Parents’ hyper-pitch and low vowel category variability in infant-directed speech are associated with 18-month-old toddlers’ expressive vocabulary

“…As detailed below, this is likely not the case (see e.g., Casillas et al, 2020;Saint-Georges et al, 2013). The majority of studies on IDS have been conducted with American English populations (for the overall prevalence of English in child language studies, see Kidd & Garcia, 2021) which have been described as having more extreme IDS properties than other languages (Fernald et al, 1989), suggesting that generalisability might be limited. While higher and more variable pitch might be the two robust characteristics of IDS present across cultures and languages (Broesch & Bryant, 2015;Farran et al, 2016;McClay et al, 2021;Narayan & McDermott, 2016; but see also Han et al, 2020Han et al, , 2021, vowel space expansion, on the other hand, has not been reported consistently across languages.…”

Experimental methods to study cultural differences in linguistics

“…Anand et al (2011) find that only 10 languages represent 85% of psycholinguistics publications and conferences, i.e., English, German, Japanese, French, Dutch, Spanish, Mandarin, Korean, Finnish, and Italian. In child language acquisition, a subfield that has a tradition of relying on both experimental and observational data, Kidd and Garcia (2021) arrive to a similar conclusion: in the past 45 years, only 1.5% of the world's 7000 languages is represented by at least one article (N=103 languages), with English and other well-studied Indo-European languages representing the great majority of publications. To my knowledge, there are no studies on the representation of different languages in the various subfields of experimental linguistics, like experimental phonology, semantics, pragmatics, syntax, and morphology (Hemforth 2013).…”

“…El Aissati et al ( 2012), however, found that this constraint does not apply in Tashelhit Berber, an Afroasiatic language that also allows clusters of consonants to be words. For more examples, see Evans and Levinson (2009) and Kidd and Garcia (2021).…”