MAD Colloquium: Breaking new ground: Insights from experimental research on infant language development in Sub-Sahara Africa

Abstract

Most infants worldwide grow up in multilingual societies in the Global South. Yet, for over half a century, research on infant language acquisition has focused almost exclusively on babies raised in monolingual Western contexts, acquiring one or at most two languages. This lack of diversity in study populations poses significant challenges for developing comprehensive theories of language development and multilingualism. In this talk, I will present research addressing this gap by focusing on infants growing up in Ghana, a highly multilingual society. I will first present survey data documenting the degree of multilingualism in Ghanaian infants’ language input. Next, I will present experimental work on multilingual infants’ speech processing, which includes a study of word recognition in code-mixed sentences and a study on the use of speech segmentation cues. I will demonstrate how we adapted classical psycholinguistic methods, using mobile equipment, to the West African context, and I will highlight where our field needs to become more flexible in embracing modifications to standard methodologies. I will conclude by discussing how our research findings relate to current theories of language acquisition.

Please contact garcia@leibniz-zas.de for Teams link!

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