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

Kidd, Evan; Garcia, Rowena

doi:10.1177/01427237221121190

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…Many other languages and language families are either heavily under-investigated or not investigated at all. This trend has been recently more closely investigated in language acquisition research, showing language samples highly skewed towards English and other Indo-European languages, and representing only approximately 1.5% of the world's languages (86,87). The largest international corpus of child language, CHILDES, also shows a strong overrepresentation of English and other Indo-European languages (88).…”

Section: Linguistics Is Still Weirdmentioning

confidence: 92%

Reproducible research practices and transparency across linguistics

Bochynska¹,

Keeble²,

Halfacre³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Scientific studies of language span across many disciplines and provide evidence for social, cultural, cognitive, technological, and biomedical studies of human nature and behavior. By becoming increasingly empirical and quantitative, linguistics has been facing challenges and limitations of the scientific practices that pose barriers to reproducibility and replicability. One of the proposed solutions to the widely acknowledged reproducibility and replicability crisis has been the implementation of transparency practices, e.g. open access publishing, preregistrations, sharing study materials, data, and analyses, performing study replications and declaring conflicts of interest. Here, we have assessed the prevalence of these practices in randomly sampled 600 journal articles from linguistics across two time points. In line with similar studies in other disciplines, we found a moderate amount of articles published open access, but overall low rates of sharing materials, data, and protocols, no preregistrations, very few replications and low rates of conflict of interest reports. These low rates have not increased noticeably between 2008/2009 and 2018/2019, pointing to remaining barriers and slow adoption of open and reproducible research practices in linguistics. As linguistics has not yet firmly established transparency and reproducibility as guiding principles in research, we provide recommendations and solutions for facilitating the adoption of these practices.

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Section: Linguistics Is Still Weirdmentioning

confidence: 92%

Reproducible research practices and transparency across linguistics

Bochynska¹,

Keeble²,

Halfacre³

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Non-Indo-European languages and language families are either underinvestigated or not investigated at all. This trend has been recently more closely examined in language acquisition research, showing that the languages under investigation were highly skewed towards English and other Indo-European languages, and represented only approximately 1.5% of the world's languages, based on data from four journals (Kidd & Garcia, 2022a, 2022b.…”

Section: Linguistics Is Still Weirdmentioning

confidence: 97%

Reproducible research practices and transparency across linguistics

Bochynska,

Keeble,

Halfacre

et al. 2023

Glossa Psycholinguistics

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Scientific studies of language span across many disciplines and provide evidence for social,  cultural, cognitive, technological, and biomedical studies of human nature and behavior. As it becomes increasingly empirical and quantitative, linguistics has been facing challenges and limitations of the scientific practices that pose barriers to reproducibility and replicability. One of the  proposed solutions to the widely acknowledged reproducibility and replicability crisis has been the implementation of transparency practices,  e.g., open access publishing, preregistrations, sharing study materials, data, and analyses, performing study replications, and declaring conflicts of interest. Here, we have assessed the prevalence of these practices in 600 randomly sampled journal articles from linguistics across two time points. In line with similar studies in other disciplines, we found that 35% of the articles were published open access and the rates of sharing materials, data, and protocols were below 10%. None of the articles reported preregistrations, 1% reported replications, and 10% had conflict of interest statements. These rates have not increased noticeably between 2008/2009 and 2018/2019, pointing to remaining barriers and the slow adoption of open and reproducible research practices in linguistics. To facilitate adoption of these practices, we provide a range of recommendations and solutions for implementing transparency and improving reproducibility of research in linguistics.

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“…[ 3 ] in English; [ 5 ] in Greek; [ 6 ] in Hebrew; [ 4 ] in Danish). However, this large skew in empirical base towards English and other mostly European languages in the RC acquisition literature means that the field lacks a data from a sufficiently diverse set of typologically different languages [ 10 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relative clause comprehension in Cantonese-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder

Lai,

Chan,

Kidd

2023

PLoS ONE

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Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), present in 2 out of every 30 children, affects primarily oral language abilities and development in the absence of associated biomedical conditions. We report the first experimental study that examines relative clause (RC) comprehension accuracy and processing (via looking preference) in Cantonese-speaking children with and without DLD, testing the predictions from competing domain-specific versus domain-general theoretical accounts. We compared children with DLD (N = 22) with their age-matched typically-developing (TD) children (AM-TD, N = 23) aged 6;6–9;7 and language-matched (and younger) TD children (YTD, N = 21) aged 4;7–7;6, using a referent selection task. Within-subject factors were: RC type (subject-RCs (SRCs) versus object-RCs (ORCs); relativizer (classifier (CL) versus relative marker ge3 RCs). Accuracy measures and looking preference to the target were analyzed using generalized linear mixed effects models. Results indicated Cantonese children with DLD scored significantly lower than their AM-TD peers in accuracy and processed RCs significantly slower than AM-TDs, but did not differ from the YTDs on either measure. Overall, while the results revealed evidence of a SRC advantage in the accuracy data, there was no indication of additional difficulty associated with ORCs in the eye-tracking data. All children showed a processing advantage for the frequent CL relativizer over the less frequent ge3 relativizer. These findings pose challenges to domain-specific representational deficit accounts of DLD, which primarily explain the disorder as a syntactic deficit, and are better explained by domain-general accounts that explain acquisition and processing as emergent properties of multiple converging linguistic and non-linguistic processes.

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

Cited by 5 publications

References 56 publications

Reproducible research practices and transparency across linguistics

Reproducible research practices and transparency across linguistics

Reproducible research practices and transparency across linguistics

Relative clause comprehension in Cantonese-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder

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