How diverse is child language acquisition research?
How diverse is child language acquisition research?
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DOI：
10.1177/01427237211066405
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发表时间：
2022-01-28
期刊：
影响因子：
1.9
通讯作者：
Garcia, Rowena
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Kidd, Evan;Garcia, Rowena
一个全面的儿童语言习得理论需要一个证据基础，以代表世界上大约7000种语言存在的类型多样性。然而，语言正在以惊人的速度消亡，未来50年是我们用其中许多语言记录习得的最后机会。在这里，我们总结了过去45年发表在四种主要儿童语言习得杂志上的研究：儿童语言杂志、第一语言杂志、语言习得杂志和语言学习与发展杂志。我们为每篇文章编码了几个变量，包括(1)参与者群体(单一语种与多语种)，(2)语言(S)，(3)主题(S)和(4)作者所属国家，从每份期刊成立到2020年底。我们发现，我们至少有一篇文章发表在大约103种语言上，约占世界语言的1.5%。文章的分布高度偏向英语和其他研究得很好的印欧语言，大多数非印欧语言只有一篇论文。大多数论文集中在对单语儿童的研究上，尽管论文并不总是明确地报告参与者的群体状况。主题在不同语言类别之间的分布更加均匀。来自北美和欧洲以外国家用非印欧语言发表的文章数量正在增加；然而，这一增长是由相对富裕的国家进行的研究推动的。总体而言，绝大多数研究都是在全球北部进行的。我们的结论是，尽管跨语言研究的历史令人自豪，但在我们声称真正具有代表性的儿童语言习得之前，该学科的目标需要重新调整。
A comprehensive theory of child language acquisition requires an evidential base that is representative of the typological diversity present in the world's 7000 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 many of them. Here, 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 several variables, including (1) participant group (mono vs multilingual), (2) language(s), (3) topic(s) and (4) 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 approximately 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 of non-Indo-European languages having just one paper. A majority of the papers focused on studies of monolingual children, although papers did not always explicitly report participant group status. The distribution of topics across language categories was more even. 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. Overall, the vast majority of the research was produced in the Global North. 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 truly a representative account of child language acquisition.