Language acquisition in crosslinguistic context - Birgit Hellwig - #Invitations | ILARA
Channel: ILARA
Date: 2021-05-06

Diversity is a key characteristic of human cultures and languages: children grow up in diverse socio-cultural settings around the world where they acquire one or more of the world’s 7000 or so languages, each presenting them with different challenges and opportunities for learning. Our theories of learning must thus be able to explain how children can learn any of these languages in any of these settings. But despite a proud history of crosslinguistic research, we only have acquisition data covering 1-2% of the world’s languages, with most of our knowledge coming from a very small number of major Western languages. In our panel discussion, we address the consequences of this empirical bias and explore the possibilities of extending acquisition research to more and varied languages. Throughout the discussion, we illustrate some of the attested diversity with examples from languages such as Eegimaa, Inuktitut, Murrinhpatha, Pitjantjatjara and Qaqet.

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Convenors and Panelists: https://en.ilaraephe.org/intervenants
Birgit Hellwig website: https://qaqet.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/
ILARA website: https://ilara.hypotheses.org/
ILARA Online sub-website: https://en.ilaraephe.org/
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Birgit Hellwig is Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics, University of Cologne (Germany), where she combines language documentation with psycholinguistics, exploring the possibilities, challenges and limitations of investigating language acquisition and socialization in diverse socio-cultural settings. In 2014, she and her team started a major project on documenting the language used with and by Qaqet children in Papua New Guinea (https://qaqet.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/). Her interest in child language emerged out of a more general interest in documenting and analyzing languages from typological perspectives, and she continues to research diverse adult languages, including the Qaqet language, but also Goemai (a Chadic language of Nigeria), Katla (a Niger-Congo language of Sudan) and Tabaq (a Nilo-Saharan language of Sudan).

Birgit studied African Linguistics at the Universities of Bayreuth and Hamburg (Germany) and she received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Nijmegen (Netherlands) in 2003. Since then she has held positions at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London, UK), La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia) and the University of Erfurt (Germany), before moving to the University of Cologne in 2014.