Dear Colleagues,

We are delighted to announce the launch of The Acquisition Sketch Project, an initiative that aims at increasing knowledge about the acquisition of understudied languages. Published as a Special Publication in the Open Access journal Language Documentation and Conservation (https://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/sp28-the-acquisition-sketch-project/), we present a model of how researchers can write an “Acquisition Sketch” of a language based on as little as 5 hours of naturalistic data. The model combines insights from Child Language Acquisition and Language Documentation, providing a detailed description of how to collect data and write a sketch.

The Special Publication is a ‘living issue’, and so more sketches will appear in it in the coming weeks and years. We encourage anyone who is interested in following the sketch format to submit their work to the project. To facilitate this process, we will be doing the following:

- Bi-monthly online meetings that serve to guide researchers through the process of writing a sketch.
- A pre-conference workshop at the International Association for the Study of Child Language conference in Prague, July 2024.

If you are interested in writing a sketch and being involved in our online meetings, we would love to hear from you. Our first online meeting will be on May 17 @ 9am CET.

Zoom meeting details:

https://anu.zoom.us/j/2877566214?pwd=dW5xTVhkUUM3ekpjS1FYcHkrbEwzUT09
Meeting ID: 287 756 6214
Password: 412080

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition
Language Documentation
Psycholinguistics