How diverse is child language acquisition research?

“For this, we used the glm and predict functions of the lme4 package (version 1.1–27.1, D. Bates et al., 2015).”

“A key feature of natural languages is their vast diversity, which is evident at every level of analysis (Evans & Levinson, 2009).”

“Language also asserts our social identity as members of a particular culture or cultures (Gallois et al., 2005; Giles et al., 1991), and in minority groups its preservation is linked to higher wellbeing (Gibson et al., 2021; Hallett et al., 2007).”

“Although the study of MSA presents a valuable case for linguistic research, it remains underexplored in the literature (Bylund et al., 2023; Kidd & Garcia, 2022; Plonsky, 2023).”

“This work serves to broaden the evidential base of how children acquire these less-studied languages (cf. Kelly et al., 2015; Kidd & Garcia, 2022) through descriptions of how families interact with young children and socialize them as novices into the communicative world of the community (Ochs &…”

“Email: bdliza@gmail.com The fact that child language research has so far accumulated findings from only 1.5% of the world’s languages (Kidd & Garcia, 2022) indicates that researchers do not know about the developmental trends found in the vast majority of languages.”

“I can’t help but applaud Kidd and Garcia (2022) for raising aloft the banner that I first hoisted 50 years ago (Slobin, 1971, 1973) They have underlined the urgency of gathering comparable child language data across languages and cultures, and they have pointed to contemporary methods of research that increase the sco…”

“Kidd and García (2022) have shown in startling detail critical factors that limit research in language acquisition in minoritized languages, namely (1) a bias in scientific inquiry that has privileged English over other languages, particularly non-IndoEuropean ones; (2) scientific agendas…”

“Psycholinguistic theory is built upon a small and unrepresentative number of languages (Berghoff & Bylund, 2025; Collart, 2024; Kidd & Garcia, 2022).”

“In their target article, Kidd and Garcia (2022) find child language research lacks diversity, a trend that has been established about the broader discipline of psychology (Arnett, 2008; Bornstein, 1980; Henrich et al., 2010).”

“…acquisition, typology, Papuan languages, language documentation Kidd and Garcia (2022) rightly point to a ‘proud history of crosslinguistic research’ (Kidd & Garcia, 2022, p. 1) in child language acquisition and sketch out how contributions from diverse languages and cultures ‘had a profound…”

“Consistent with arguments that language researchers need to attend to diversity within their samples (Kidd & Garcia, 2022), it would be beneficial to examine the role of feedback within a more diverse population of children.”

“Kidd and Garcia (2022) found that 87% of articles published in major language acquisition journals from 1975 to 2020 were based on North American or European samples, and only 1.5% of the world’s languages were represented in those journals.”

“In broad terms, our motivation for this study draws from the fact that bilingual learners, while widely represented around the world, are vastly under-represented in linguistic research (Kidd & Garcia, 2022).”

“…settings, we believe continuing to rely on such measures limits our ability to learn more about child speech production across languages and human populations, and are likely key in explaining why fewer than 1% of languages are represented in mainstream language development journals [5].”

“…other fi elds, the over-reliance on Northern contexts and subjects has been criticized, and researchers have been urged to expand their participant bases and to be more careful in making claims about universality (Bylund et al. 2023; Castro Torres and Alburez-Gutierrez 2022; Kidd and Garcia 2022).”

“…sentence production studies in less than 1% of the world’s 7000 languages, with most research in the broader domain of psycholinguistics focusing on English and other larger Germanic and Romance languages spoken in Western Europe (Berghoff & Bylund, 2025; Collart, 2024; Kidd & Garcia, 2022).”

“Scaff and colleagues convincingly argue for greater diversity and generalizability in the field (see also Kidd & Garcia, 2022; Singh et al., 2023), making a strong case for studying child language acquisition in more varied countries, more socioeconomically diverse populations (in terms of…”

“Kidd and Garcia (2022) correctly point out that working with understudied languages is both time-consuming and difficult.”

“This topic is underexplored, as is acquisition of Creoles in general (see Kidd & Garcia, 2022, which shows that for each Creole language that has been researched, there have been only one or two articles published in major journals over the last 45 years).”

“Language acquisition research is fundamentally biased toward a few European languages (Blasi et al., 2022; Kidd & Garcia, 2022; Lieven & Stoll, 2009; Pye, 2021), and the bias for spoken languages is even stronger (Lillo-Martin & Henner, 2021).”

“Kidd and Garcia (2022), in a review of languages used in child-language-acquisition research between 1974 and 2020, reported a bias towards English and other Indo-European languages.”

“We will draw specific evidence from studies conducted on children acquiring Turkish, as language development theories must represent diverse languages and language families (E. Kidd & Garcia, 2022).”

“In child language acquisition, there is a pressing call for cross-linguistic research, asking for a broader inclusion of linguistic diversity in studies to achieve a more comprehensive and representative understanding of the subject (Kidd & Garcia, 2022; Lieven, 1994; Slobin, 1985; Stoll, 2016).”

“In the field of children’s language acquisition, numerous studies have focused on children with Indo-European mother-tongue backgrounds and the field has been dominated by studies with English-speaking children (Christiansen et al., 2022; Kidd & Garcia, 2022).”

“A key implication of their study is the need to compare the acquisition of similar systems in typologically related languages (see also Kidd & Garcia, 2022; Pye, 2019).”

“As noted by Kidd and Garcia (2022), much of the existing evidence in child language acquisition research comes from a small number of languages, such as English and French, which limits the generalizability of current findings.”

“Its variability across languages and cultures makes it important to study on a wider scale, if it is to be better understood (Lovcevic et al., 2025) and to overcome the challenges posed by the insufficient language coverage in the study of child language acquisition (Kidd & Garcia, 2022).”

“Sign languages are underrepresented in child language studies, which overwhelmingly focus on spoken languages, particularly Indo-European spoken languages (Kidd & Garcia, 2022; Lillo-Martin & Hochgesang, 2022).”

“There is a growing consensus on the need for diversification, including studying language acquisition in non-Western and rural societies, particularly by indigenous scholars (Cristia et al., 2023; Kidd & Garcia, 2022; Pascoe et al., 2024).”

“…speaking lesser-spoken languages, including African Indigenous languages, is severely under-researched, which is in line with the overall trend in child language acquisition research limited, to a large extent, to national languages with a substantial speaker population (Kidd & Garcia, 2022).”

“Recent years have seen several recommendations for expanding the range of languages for which child acquisition is documented (Pye, 2021, 2022; Kidd and Garcia, 2022; Hellwig et al., 2023).”

“Most research on child language development has been conducted amongst speakers of English (see Kidd & Garcia, 2022) and in minority-world contexts, i.e., those countries where the minority of the world ’ s population resides but which are generally well-resourced.”

“…child language journals ( Journal of Child Language , First Language , Language Acquisition , Language Learning and Development ) between 1974 and 2020, Kidd and Garcia (2022) found papers on only 103 languages, representing a mere 1.5% of the world’s languages (see also Kelly & Nordlinger, 2014).”

“The field of language acquisition has yet to address the full range of grammatical diversity found amongst the world’s languages (Kidd & Garcia, 2022).”

“Kidd and Garcia (2022) have cogently articulated some problems for science associated with the lack of language diversity in L1 acquisition research.”

“Language diversity, phonological development, unit of representation, whole-word phonology, Mandarin The quantitative analysis provided by Kidd and Garcia (2022) is a powerful demonstration of how far the field of language acquisition still has to go for us to begin to have a fair idea of the…”

“com/home/fla The view from Hebrew: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022)”

“Our commentary responded to the call to diversify the field of language acquisition in Kidd and Garcia (2022) by presenting a toolkit for crosslinguistic research on the development of prosody.”

“In a recent article, Kidd & Garcia (2022) analyzed the languages that have been studied in the four major language acquisition journals ( First Language, Journal of Child Language, Language Acquisition, Language Learning and Development ), noting that only 1.5% of the world’s languages have been…”

“In preparation for this volume, we conducted a literature search 1 that took us beyond the four journals surveyed in Kidd and Garcia (2022) to include further publishers, including regional journals, unpublished theses, and working papers.”

“This bias towards certain types of languages and cultures represents an ongoing challenge to the field of language acquisition (e.g. Kelly et al., 2015; Kidd & Garcia, 2022; Pye, 2021) and is acknowledged as a limitation by Mattes and Dressler (2021, p. 300) at the conclusion of the volume.”

“Cantonese is among the top 20 most spoken languages in the world (Ethnologue, 2022), but its acquisition is relatively understudied in comparison to the acquisition of English and other major Indo-European languages (Kidd & Garcia, 2022).”

“Indeed, more research is conducted on English than on other languages, and existing theories of child language acquisition are predominately founded on findings in children from Romance and Germanic language backgrounds, such as English, Spanish, and German (Kidd & Garcia, 2022; Singh & Fu, 2016).”