Beyond WEIRD: an interdisciplinary approach to Language acquisition

Jury:

Titia Benders (Macquarie University)
Elika Bergelson (Duke University)
Damian Blasi (University of Zurich)
Anne Christophe (ENS)
Ewan Dunbar (Paris Diderot)
Adriana Weisleder (Northwestern University)

To date, most of what we know in early development comes from research on children in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic populations (WEIRD; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). There is much less information about the early environment, learning mechanisms, and language acquisition benchmarks of children who grow up in non-WEIRD conditions. Throughout the dissertation, with different methodological approaches and datasets, I work with populations often underrepresented in developmental research: populations from diverse socioeconomic status (SES)  backgrounds and indigenous communities.

I contributed to the study of whether linguistic input has a crucial impact on later lexical outcomes across three studies: a meta-analysis exploring the relationship between SES and early lexical development; an empirical study of the effects of SES, lingual status, and age on lexical processing and vocabulary in young French children; and finally, a study using daylong recordings to analyze the quantity and sources of language input afforded to children from a small-scale community in the lowlands Bolivia, the Tsimane’. 

In the final discussion, I present the benefits and limitations of cross-cultural research and the dangers of generalizing from only one kind of socio-ecological background.