The Bender rule is the informal idea that one ought to explicitly mention the name of a language in a publication on language and linguistics. It is named after Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington (Seattle) who has written and discussed the need to be explicit about languages that one studies. The impetus behind it is the observation that studies on English (or other commonly-studied languages) are typically understood as a default norm, while less commonly studied languages are more likely to be overtly mentioned. This contributes to a biased perspective in linguistics that only the conclusions from studies on English contribute to a general picture of Language, while similar conclusions from studies on other languages reflect language-specific phenomena and are less generalizable. A similar issue arises in work on indigenous languages that I've written about before.
People have talked about the Bender rule since 2019. I'd like to think that linguists have paid attention to what this means in academic publications since then. After all, it would be fairly simple for journal editors or editorial boards to implement a policy where languages are mentioned in titles or in abstracts. After all, people often read/skim the titles and abstracts of most publications without investing in more time to read all the details. If one were to apply the Bender rule to titles and/or abstracts (and yes, I am suggesting it), it has the additional benefit of helping your librarians organize publications better by topic language.
So, how have some popular journals fared in 2022? Are many publications mentioning the languages of study? I thought I would look at two popular journals that I am familiar with: the Journal of Memory and Language (JML), and the Journal of Phonetics (JPhon). Both journals heavily focus on experimental research. I decided to include two separate measures here: does the journal article mention the language of study in the title? and does it mention it in the abstract? I have excluded publications that reflect surveys of methodological reports, as these lack experiments and they tend not to focus on individual languages anyways.
For JML, between January 2022 - present, 43 relevant articles have been published. Of these, just 2/43 mention the language of study in the title. Within the abstracts, 8/43 articles mention the language of study. Studies that explicitly mentioned languages were those on Mandarin Chinese, ASL, and those involving bilingual populations.
For JPhon, between January 2022 - present, 40 relevant articles have been published. Of these, 18/40 mentioned the language of study in the title. Within the abstracts, 35/40 articles mention the language of study.
Why might these numbers (and practices) might be so different across journals? Are the psycholinguistic patterns found in brains and minds in the articles in JML fundamentally different in terms of their language-specificity from studies on phonetic memory/perception, speech planning, speech coordination, and speech articulation found in JPhon? In other words, is it that only the phoneticians need worry about the Bender rule?
I think most phoneticians would probably state that a study on the articulatory and acoustic phonetics of one language is bound to be fundamentally different from a similar study on another language. Thus, there is less of an expectation that one's findings will immediately generalize to all of Language. Rather, one draws conclusions and amasses evidence for common patterns by looking across a large enough sample of languages. Existing theories are examined, tested with new data, and revised.
I don't know what psycholinguists believe here though. Perhaps it is the case that many still believe that English-focused studies in psycholinguistics are always uncovering something fundamental about Language in a way that studies in phonetics are not, despite apparent evidence to the contrary. I have to doubt that though. I know many psycholinguists and they seem to be a pretty open-minded group. For the time being, it would seem like JML is failing the Bender rule.
