Abstract
Kidd and Garcia report that language acquisition studies are skewed toward monolingual and English-speaking populations. This commentary considers Kidd and Garcia’s arguments in light of our research on mother-preschooler discourse and non-verbal communication in Thai monolingual and Thai-English bilingual children. We discuss lessons learned from testing linguistically diverse children and underscore the importance of research on non-WEIRD (Western, Industrialized, Educated, Rich, and Democratic) populations. We advocate for the inclusion of children who speak understudied languages and those who speak multiple languages in developmental science.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 804-808 |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| Journal | First Language |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 2022 |
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported in part by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Numbers R01HD059858 and R21HD106759 to Viorica Marian. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. The authors thank the families that participated in the studies discussed in this commentary. They also thank the research assistants who transcribed and coded the video data, including Julia Borland, Jessica Yung-Chieh Chuang, Kaniya Hester, Lesley Meza, Laura Montenegro, Grace Pickens, Claire Simcox, and Nadia van den Berg. Finally, they thank the members of the Northwestern University Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group, as well as Drs. Erika Hoff, Steve Zecker, and Adriana Weisleder, for their helpful comments on this work. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported in part by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Numbers R01HD059858 and R21HD106759 to Viorica Marian. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
Keywords
- Child language acquisition
- bilingualism
- cross-cultural
- cross-linguistic
- mother–child dyads
- narrative discourse
- non-verbal communication
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Education
- Language and Linguistics
- Linguistics and Language