Towards Diversifying Early Language Development Research: The First Truly Global International Summer/Winter School on Language Acquisition (/L+/) 2021

Aravena-Bravo, Paulina; Cristià, Alejandrina; Garcia, Rowena; Kotera, Hiromasa; Nicolas, Ramona Kunene; Laranjo, Ronel O.; Arokoyo, Bolanle Elizabeth; Benavides-Varela, Silvia; Benders, Titia; Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie; Cychosz, Meg; Ben, Rodrigo Dal; Diop, Yatma; Durán-Urzúa, Catalina; Havron, Naomi; Manalili, Marie Adrienne Robles; Narasimhan, Bhuvana; Omane, Paul Okyere; Rowland, Caroline F.; Kolberg, Letícia Schiavon; Ssemata, Andrew Sentoogo; Styles, Suzy J; Troncoso-Acosta, Belén; Woon, Fei Ting

doi:10.1080/15248372.2023.2231083

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…While there have been some studies with children aged 3 years and above in Ghana (e.g., Amoako & Stemberger, 2022a, 2022b; Omane & Höhle, 2021), the present study represents the first psycholinguistics research on infants growing up in Ghana. Our experiences support and illustrate several issues raised in the ongoing discussion on diversifying language acquisition research (e.g., Aravena-Bravo et al, 2023; Cristia et al, 2023; Kidd & Garcia, 2022; Paradis, 2022; Singh et al, 2023). First, given the prevalent multilingualism and its immense diversity in Ghana’s cities, it would have been impossible to recruit a monolingual control group or a homogenous multilingual group.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 69%

“…Most research on infant and child language development has focused on populations growing up in Western cultures with Indo-European languages. As this can cause biases in theory building, there is a growing call among language acquisition researchers and developmental psychologists for more diversity across languages and cultures studied (e.g., Aravena-Bravo et al, 2023; Cristia et al, 2023; Kidd & Garcia, 2022; Singh et al, 2023). Across the world, infants’ early language and cultural experiences may, for example, vary significantly concerning the number of languages they are immersed in.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Vowel harmony preferences in infants growing up in multilingual Ghana (Africa).

Omane,

Benders,

Boll-Avetisyan

2024

Developmental Psychology

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Infants' preference for vowel harmony (VH, a phonotactic constraint that requires vowels in a word to be featurally similar) is thought to be language-specific: Monolingual infants learning VH languages show a listening preference for VH patterns by 6 months of age, while those learning non-VH languages do not (Gonzalez-Gomez et al., 2019;Van Kampen et al., 2008). We investigated sensitivity to advanced tongue root (ATR) harmony in Akan (Kwa, Niger-Congo) in 40 six-month-old multilingual infants (21 girls) in Ghana, West Africa (an understudied population), all learning Akan, Ghanaian English, and most of them several other understudied African languages (e.g., Ga, Ewe). We hypothesized that infants learning both ATR harmony and nonharmony languages would demonstrate sensitivity to ATR harmony. Using the central fixation procedure, infants were presented with disyllabic nonwords that were either harmonic (e.g., puti) or nonharmonic (e.g., petɔ) based on their ATR features. Infants demonstrated sensitivity to ATR harmony with a familiarity preference, listening longer to harmonic syllable sequences than nonharmonic ones. The relative amount of exposure to (an) ATR harmony language(s) did not modulate the preference. These results shed light on our understanding of early multilingualism: they suggest that early sensitivity to VH in multilinguals may be similar to monolingual infants learning other types of VH, irrespective of simultaneous experience with non-VH languages. We conclude with reflections on studying infant language acquisition in multilingual Africa.

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