Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Impacts on Language Acquisition: Insights from Japanese-learning Children

To date, research in psycholinguistics has been conducted primarily on English and other Western European languages, even though they comprise only a fraction of the world's languages (Kidd & Garcia, 2021). Yet, findings from these limited languages have been widely assumed to apply to human languages in general. More recently, however, the limitations of theories and models based on a limited set of languages have become widely recognized, and new efforts are underway to broaden the range of target languages (Singh, Rajendra, & Mazuka, 2022). In this presentation, I will discuss findings from three studies, each of which demonstrates that research on East Asian languages can offer significant contributions to language development research by taking advantage of a broader diversity of evidence.