Towards Diversifying Early Language Development Research: The First Truly Global International Summer/Winter School on Language Acquisition (/L+/) 2021

ABSTRACT

With a long-term aim of empowering researchers everywhere to contribute to work on language development, we organized the First Truly Global /L+/ International Summer/ Winter School on Language Acquisition, a free 5-day virtual school for early career researchers. In this paper, we describe the school, our experience organizing it, and lessons learned. The school had a diverse organizer team, composed of 26 researchers (17 from under represented areas: Subsaharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Central and South America); and a diverse volunteer team, with a total of 95 volunteers from 35 different countries, nearly half from under represented areas. This helped world-wide Page 5 of 5 promotion of the school, leading to 958 registrations from 88 different countries, with 300 registrants (based in 63 countries, 80% from under represented areas) selected to participate in the synchronous aspects of the event. The school employed asynchronous (pre-recorded lectures, which were close-captioned) and synchronous elements (e.g., discussions to place the recorded lectures into participants' context; networking events) across three time zones. A post-school questionnaire revealed that 99% of participants enjoyed taking part in the school. Not with standing these positive quantitative outcomes, qualitative comments suggested we fell short in several areas, including the geographic diversity among lecturers and greater customization of contents to the participants’ contexts. Although much remains to be done to promote inclusivity in linguistic research, we hope our school will contribute to empowering researchers to investigate and publish on language acquisition in their home languages, to eventually result in more representative theories and empirical generalizations.

KEYWORDS:

• Online conference
• geographic diversity
• metascience
• networking

Acknowledgments

We thank the volunteers, who made the/L+/school possible, and all the students for their enthusiasm, active participation, and feedback, which is guiding the organization of the 2023 edition of the school. NBA’s and RG’s work was supported as part of the project C07 in the SFB 1287 at University of Potsdam funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) Project ID 317633480. The school, but not the writing of this manuscript, received support from the following: University of Potsdam, the University of Padova, the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore’s National Research Foundation. We thank Gallaudet University interpreters for supporting Gallaudet students in our school.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Contributor statement

Conceptualization: AC, AS, CR, LSK, MC, MM, NBA, PAB, RDB, RG, RKN, RL, SJS, YD

Data curation MC, RDB, RG

Resources AC, BTA, CDU, FTW, HK, LSK, PAB, PO, RDB, YD

Supervision ACr, AS, CR, FTW, LSK, MC, PAB, RG, RKN, RL, SBV

Visualization MC, NH, RG

Writing – original draft AC, BTA, CDU, CR, HK, LSK, MC, PAB, PO, RG, RKN, RL, SBV, SJS, TB, YD

Writing – review & editing AC, AS, BEA, BN, BTA, CDU, CR, FTW, HK, LSK, MC, MM, NBA, NH, PAB, PO, RDB, RG, RKN, RL, SBV, SJS, TB, YD

Formal Analysis N/R

Investigation N/R

Methodology N/R

Project administration N/R

Software N/R

Validation N/R

PAB, AC, RG, HK, RKN, and RL carried out the conceptualization and led the research planning and execution;

MC, RDB, RG, RL, and LSK developed the methodology used in this article; PAB, TB, RG, and NH were responsible for the visualization of results, PAB, AC conducted and carried out the data curation; PAB, AC, RG, HK, RKN, RL, SBV, MC, RDB, CDU, POO, LSK, and BTA prepared the writing and the preparation of the original draft; and ALL authors reviewed and edited the manuscript.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Although our paper may benefit all readers who are interested in increasing research diversity, we have tailored it to two types of readers who may benefit the most from our paper: First, readers who are thinking of organizing educational events, conferences, or workshops, and want to do this in a way that will increase participant and presenter diversity, and second, researchers of all levels who are based in parts of the world that are less commonly represented in the literature. For the former, we have created more extensive documentation that will help them increase diversity (Supplementary Materials A-I). For the latter, we have tried to highlight results, experiences, and opinions that resonate with our diverse participants and volunteers, and help raise awareness about the barriers they/we face.

² The Supplementary Materials document is available via https://osf.io/fbnda

³ For example, we had a session on publishing articles in journals.

⁴ https://whova.com/

⁵ https://www.gather.town/

⁶ https://zoom.us/

⁷ The target countries represented among volunteers’ countries of origin were: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Philippines, Senegal, Singapore, South Africa, Uganda, Uruguay and Vietnam.

⁸ https://www.dpss.unipd.it/summer-school-2021/

⁹ We used a combination of algorithmic and human decision-making in the selection. In the future, organizers should instead consider randomly assigning registrants to live events, so as to use a randomized control design to more accurately measure the impact of these time- and people-intensive components on participant diversity. The absence of randomization is one of the reasons why we have not followed up with participants to measure effects of the school.

¹⁰ Some participants suggested including different subjects such as courses on experiment building and data analysis (three comments), lessons on different theories or models of language acquisition (one comment), and more content on sign languages (two comments) and language disorders (five comments).

¹¹ An example is the localized versions of the Cognitive Science Society 2021 meeting https://cskemp.github.io/cogscimeetups21/

¹² The number of people commenting on this, split by platform, is: Whova app (4), Zoom (2 stating the app was blocked in certain countries), Gather.Town (1 relating incompatibilities with an operating system), Padlet (1).

¹³ Other respondents reported having trouble maintaining the discussions in the breakout rooms without the aid of a more experienced discussant (three comments), and that the discussions be more focused on the topic of the lecture (two comments).

¹⁴ To join, check their website and fill out the form https://www.latinlar.com/

¹⁵ To join, click https://chat.whatsapp.com/KGIzlmJyIO9DQTG9nSiKjk

¹⁶ To join, click https://discord.gg/Qm2pq6V3vn