The acquisition of sign languages in rural contexts - what can we do when samples will always be 'too small'?

Our knowledge and theories about language acquisition are skewed towards urban languages, and primarily English (Kidd & Garcia, 2022). Cristia and colleagues convincingly show that studies on the acquisition of rural languages are scarce. The authors suggest that in rural settings, combining experimental and observational approaches is critical to testing and sharpening our theories about language acquisition. Nevertheless, they also acknowledge the numerous challenges that make it difficult to conduct, analyse and publish this type of work.