Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A comprehensive theory of human language requires a data set that is representative of the typological diversity present in the world’s 7,000+ languages (Evans & Levinson, 2009). However, the treatment of linguistic diversity in cognitive science has been historically uneven. While many subfields of linguistics explicitly aim to describe and explain variation (e.g., linguistic typology, phonology), adjacent fields like psycholinguistics have suffered from an overreliance on English (Blasi et al., 2022; Christiansen et al., 2022a; Kidd & Garcia, 2022), mimicking cognitive science in general (Henrich et al., 2010). This large data skew prevents the field from fully explaining how humans acquire, represent, and process language, one of the core defining features of our species.