Published August 28, 2026 | Version v1

Big Team Science for language science: opportunities and challenges

Description

Abstract: The present paper advocates for incorporating Big Team Science practices into the language sciences. Big Team Science is a promising mode of collaborative research in which top-down coordination directs efforts by a large number of researchers from different institutions towards a common scientific goal. The redistribution of resources and division of labor enabled by Big Team Science may enable researchers to increase methodological rigor, systematically explore claims across a wider sample of languages, and to diversify both the languages studied and the researchers engaged. However, implementing Big Team Science practices is not without challenges, some of which are unique to the language sciences. We suggest strategies and best practices for adapting to these challenges, including theoretical and methodological pluralism, variation in conditions among data collection sites, and navigating a trade-off between maximizing methodological rigor and ability to engage with the most inclusive, typologically broad language samples.

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Additional details

Funding

Leverhulme Trust
The rise and fall of a tone
European Research Council
ERC-ADG-835263
Agence Nationale de la Recherche
Laboratory of Excellence Empirical Foundations of Linguistics (Labex-EFL) ANR-10-LABX-0083
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
FU791/9-1
The Research Council of Norway
ICONIC 350026
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
CW 10/1-1