My research combines studies of
- language contact, including
- the development and structure of Mixed Languages
- language variation
- language change
- language acquisition, and
- language documentation.
Language contact and acquisition
Although many children in the world learn more than one language from birth or from a very young age, few studies have examined children’s language learning in contexts in which the children receive language input in several codes or languages from the same interlocutors or in the same settings. The ways children deal with varied input sheds light on children’s processing strategies. Viewed from another perspective, it can provide information about language maintenance, shift or attrition, especially in contexts in which the languages or codes differ in their status in the local and wider communities.
I am interested in children’s language learning in contexts in which several codes or languages are spoken to and around children, and in generational changes in linguistic patterns. My focus is on questions such as:
- What kinds of changes are taking place in the speech community?
- What are the influences on those changes?
- To what extent might they be due to language contact?
- How are they produced by each generation of speakers?
- Which of the several codes present in the speech community do children produce and at what point in their language development?
- Who are their main speech models?
- To what extent is each generation regularizing any emergent patterns?
- What local and nonlocal social and political forces influence language maintenance in one community and language shift in another?
Language contact
I am also interested in documentation of adult speech, for example, in:
- structures of Mixed Languages, especially Light Warlpiri
- code-switching practices
- discourse practices, choices of register
Language documentation
Methodologies:
- Video recordings of naturally occurring interactions in families, ie. adults and children talking; children playing with each other.
- Elicited production of stories told from picture stimulus. Three picture books -
- The Monster Story (pdf)
- The Bush Coconut story (pdf)
- The Hunting Story (pdf)
- are designed to elicit overt transitive subject nominals, so that there is the opportunity for ergative case-marking to be applied to the nouns.
Another is designed to elicit locatives - The Bike Story (pdf).
The other picture books are general in theme with no particular structural aim. These are:
- The Guitar Story (pdf)
- The Crocodile Story (pdf)
- The Sick Woman Story (pdf) and
- The Story of the Boy Who Runs Away (to be added).
- A comprehension task in which children saw two events each with two animate participants. In each event one participant performed an action on the other. The children heard a sentence and pointed to one of the events. These stimuli are available on request.
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