Despite a long history of crosslinguistic research, language acquisition research continues to be severely biased towards the large Germanic and Romance languages (Kidd & Garcia 2022). There is thus an urgent need to increase language coverage so that we can gain a better understanding of the variation space.

In this regard, Research Area 3 benefits from our own long-standing dedication to constructing large-scale child language corpora, e.g. of the Qaqet language spoken in Papua New Guinea, or the Datooga language spoken in Tanzania.

Given the many methodological, logistic and ethical challenges, the number of available child language corpora of understudied and underresourced languages will continue to remain small, though. We are therefore centrally involved in a framework that facilitates constructing small-scale child language corpora across diverse languages and cultures: The Acquisition Sketch Project.