Language Documentation

2019

A cross-linguistic investigation of the factors affecting ethnobiological knowledge transmission in Arnhem Land - This project will investigate the factors affecting the state of a community's knowledge of the natural environment, by systematically measuring key linguistic and non-linguistic variables in several languages of Arnhem Land. Using an interdisciplinary approach involving language documentation and ethnobiological techniques, this project will shed light on the complex interactions between language endangerment, knowledge transmission to younger generations and non-linguistic variables, such as the health of the local natural environment and access to traditional practices. The project will develop a framework for determining linguistic and ethnobiological vitality separately, allowing targeted interventions to safeguard either or both as necessary.

Aung Si

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Language Documentation

2016

A Field Manual for ultrasound research - This project will critically enhance the description of Iwaidja, and develop a draft field manual for ultrasound research. The project is based in a case study analysing a problematic segment, a velar approximant, in Iwaidja, an endangered Australian languages. Cross-linguistically, the analysis of approximants presents many issues. The project will illustrate how articulatory data from ultrasound can contribute to advancing analysis in challenging domains, such as the analysis of approximants. The use of ultrasound in linguistics is expanding. Its extension into fieldwork is comparatively recent. There are currently no field protocols for equipment, settings, data collection, processing and analysis.

Robert Mailhammer

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Language Documentation

2016

A Language Survey of Pulau Simeulue - A language survey, carried out in collaboration with Acehnese researchers, of Pulau Simeulue and Pulau Banyak, Aceh to ascertain the status and use of the languages spoken there and to identify possible projects for further investigation by Acehnese postgraduate and undergraduate students and ways in which these languages might be supported.

Robert Amery

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2017

A Pan-Australian Model for the Transcription Acceleration of Australian Indigenous Languages - The aim of this project is to adapt existing software tools that can segment the Indigenous languages of Australia making recorded speech searchable. This tool will greatly assist with and accelerate linguistic analysis of languages which are endangered and disappearing. With the rapid increase in data generation, spurred on by cheaper and more available digital storage, there is a growing need for methods that allow searching and cataloguing speech data. There have been many tools available for languages with many speakers and many centuries of linguistic study e.g. English and German. There are fewer tools for languages which are endangered.

Hywel Stoakes

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2016

A Taxonomy of Signalling Games - An image flashes up on a screen in front of you. You must communicate this to your partner, with one catch: you can’t see, hear, or speak with them. All you have are some strange symbols. You press a symbol and it flashes up on their screen, and your partner interprets the strange symbol. Over time, you and your partner create a new signaling system. Just how this happens, however, is not clear: some claim feedback is necessary, others say reinforcement, learning biases, rational behaviour or even financial reward. Our experiments will investigate how, exactly, novel signaling systems self-organize.

Matthew Spike

Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2016

A ‘data well’ prototype for Sahul phonologies - Australia and New Guinea belong to the ancient continent of Sahul—a single landmass through most of human history, separated by rising seas just 8,500 years ago. Today, these regions are home to extreme linguistic diversity, both in terms of the sheer quantity and complexity of languages present. A phonological ‘data well’ of Sahul is a rich data source on the sound systems of Australia and New Guinea. Unlike traditional ‘databases’ which supply answers to predefined questions, a 'data well' can be returned to again and again, with different questions, drawing new databases each time. We are building a prototype.

Jayden Macklin-Cordes

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Language Documentation

2020

Acoustic description and prosodic conditioning of vowels in Drehu and Lifou French - Young generations in Lifou grow up as bilingual speakers of Drehu, an Oceanic language, and Lifou French, an emergent variety. Two previous accounts of Drehu have phonologically described its vowel system. However, no acoustic data was reported and there is disagreement on the IPA-symbol for two vowels. Lifou French is a largely undocumented variety. This project seeks to provide a first acoustic account of the vowel systems in the two languages of this community. Additionally, it investigates the relationship between vowel quality and duration relative to prosodic structure. The results of this study will provide an up-to-date documentation of two vowel inventories.

Catalina Torres

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Language Documentation

2018

Acoustics of Nungon Adult Directed Speech vs. Child Directed Speech - Nungon is spoken by 1,000 people in remote Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. Nungon phonetics and phonology are described in Sarvasy’s (2017) grammar. But acoustic analysis of the vowel inventory there is limited and based on the speech of one speaker. In this project, we will complete a comprehensive acoustic analysis of fundamental frequency and vowel quality in adult-directed (ADS) and child-directed (CDS) Nungon speech from a larger number of speakers using the latest acoustic analysis techniques. Such a detailed acoustic analysis is rare for CDS in under-described languages like Nungon, as most previous research focuses on fundamental frequency differences.

Hannah Sarvasy

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Language Documentation

2017

An acoustic-phonetic description of the vowels in Crow (Apsaáloke) - The most current description of the Crow vowel inventory is found in Graczyk's (2007) Grammar of Crow. This grammar is limited in that it describes only the gross vowel characteristics and does not provide any specific information relating to the acoustic properties of the vowels (e.g., formant and duration measurements). This project will provide the first acoustic description of the monophthongs and diphthongs in Crow. It will become a point of reference for researchers investigating the Crow sound system and it will also be a valuable resource for language teachers and learners.

Jaydene Elvin

Crow

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2016

Analysis tools for large speech corpora - This project will develop a set of analysis tools designed to assist researchers in investigating the properties of large corpora of speech recorded in natural conversational settings. It will facilitate investigation of a style of speech which until relatively recently has been largely neglected within Australia, but which is central to the objectives of CoEDL. The tools which are developed will draw on pre-existing open-source analysis packages and will themselves be freely-available to the research community and configured to enable their further development.

Gerry Docherty

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Language Documentation

2018

Annotating historic Kunbarlang recordings - This project works with the Indigenous communities of Warruwi and Maningrida to index, transcribe and translate Kunbarlang recordings made by Kinslow-Harris in 1965 and Coleman in the 1980s. This will mean that these recordings can be used to understand the language change over the last five decades, through comparison with more recent recordings by O’Keeffe, Aung Si, and Kapitonov. With the permission of speakers and/or their descendants, the recordings and annotations will be made available in community archives and more widely through the Mawng Ngaralk website.

Ruth Singer

Kunbarlang

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

Arandic Dictionaries Audio Pilot - This pilot project aims to test methodologies for the incorporation of audio into existing dictionary resources for the Arandic languages of Central Australia. Having access to audio as a standard component of dictionary resources is important, especially for small, endangered language communities. The project team will work with speakers of Alyawarr and Anmatyerr to record audio for a selected subset of 200 dictionary entries. The team will evaluate the most efficient methodologies for the incorporation of audio into existing dictionary resources and for the generation of phonetic transcriptions of the audio for phonetic analysis.

Mark Harvey

Alyawarr, Anmatyerr

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2020

Arandic Elpis project - The Arandic Elpis project will research and document the process of adapting recordings and transcriptions from a group of Arandic languages, to develop language models for speech recognition systems. The project will investigate approaches to developing a dataset suitable for machine learning and other computational processes, including a standardised orthography. The benefits of combining languages to build general speech models for language groups will be evaluated, to gain insight into whether general systems can be useful for transcribing languages which otherwise may not have enough recordings to build their own system.

Ben Foley

Arrernte, Kaytetye

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2017

Are super-complex words represented like sentences in speakers' minds? - Many Australian languages defy a seemingly straightforward distinction between 'words' and 'phrases' (groups of words acting as a unit of meaning) by having very complex words with meanings that English would require a sentence to express. This project aims to examine speakers' knowledge of ‘super-complex’ words in the Australian language Wubuy, using innovative 'low tech' experimental approaches suited for remote field research. The results will experimentally investigate what a 'word' is in Wubuy, and thereby inform not only language description/typology but also likely challenge current models of speech processing and language acquisition, which are built on this fundamental distinction.

Brett Baker, Rikke Bundgaard-Nielsen

Wubuy

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

Auto-harvested insights from wordlists: How to assess the crop - In a time of big-data linguistics, an area which is poised to flourish is the world of “megadictionaries”, covering hundreds if not thousands of languages. In this context, there is an increasing need, not only for scalable methods which can capitalize on such resources, but for a capacity to quality-check what those methods produce. This interdisciplinary project tests two approaches. On one approach, we build a battery of statistical techniques to probe the robustness of phonotactic phylogenetic results obtained from a mega-dictionary of Australia languages. On another, we compare results obtained by a traditional typological literature search with those extracted automatically.

Erich Round

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2018

Bininj Kunwok online university language course - Currently in Australia there are few opportunities for University students to study Indigenous languages. The development of a Digital Language Shell is bridging that gap by enabling Indigenous language authorities to develop University level courses on their own terms. This project expands on the pilot program of 4 units of Bininj Kunwok delivered using the Shell in 2016 (see http://language-shell.cdu.edu.au/report-on-pilot-project/). It will develop a full semester course for delivery at undergraduate or postgraduate level, using an online platform, under the authority of the Bininj Kunwok Language Project Reference Group.

Cathy Bow

Bininj Kunwok

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2017

Brainwaves and clause chains: Testing EEG in PNG - Models of sentence processing have largely relied on experiments with speakers of a small sample of familiar languages—English, Spanish, Dutch, etc. Hundreds of other languages, however, involve multi-clausal sentences—‘clause chains’—that differ syntactically from English sentences. Speakers likely also process clause chains differently. This project will use mobile electroencephalography (EEG) data from speakers of the clause chaining language Nungon in remote Papua New Guinea to establish how the brain processes clause chains. Of special interest are: correlates of working memory, syntactic agreement, and attentional switching. The project will give strong evidence on how hierarchical structures shape language processing.

Hannah Sarvasy

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

Bridging processing and learning: the influence of affect processing on infant word learning - Babies are active language learners, constantly attending to various cues in the environment that aid learning. One specific cue that babies are sensitive to is emotion conveyed in the facial and voice expressions of adults. However, do these emotional cues help them acquire their native language? If so, exactly how do these cues assist? Is the benefit specific to positive emotion, which is commonly present in IDS, or are all emotions beneficial? In this project we will link social cues to language acquisition, and find out how emotional components of interaction affect word learning.

Gabrielle Weidemann

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

Building a better ‘paradigm’ - In linguistics, the two dimensional, grid-like PARADIGM has been the central tool for displaying complex information about lexemes for centuries. We are building a better paradigm, by combining linguistic expertise with recent advances and insights from the field of visualisation. This project seeks to (i) convert a prototype now being built in java, into a package in R (for reasons given below); and (ii) collate a set of example paradigms from languages of Australia and surrounds, formatted as R paradigm data structures.

Erich Round

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Language Documentation

2020

Building a corpus and a comprehensive trilingual dictionary of Western Yugur - Western Yugur is an endangered language which is spoken by around 2,000 people in north-western China. This project works with the Yugur community to transcribe, translate and annotate some Western Yugur early recordings made in the 1980s; and compare some historical documentation with more recent video and audio recordings, especially some folk songs and stories, including commentaries on Yugur traditional clothing. This project will not only enable the recordings to be made available for analysis and corpus work, but also use the corpus to further compile the first Western Yugur-Chinese-English online dictionary for community members and researchers.

Yarjis Xueqing Zhong

Western Yugur

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2017

Building a social robot for the Ngukurr Language Centre - This project is a new collaboration between CoEDL social robotics lab and the Ngukurr language centre in the Northern Territory to design and evaluate new technologies for language teaching and recording. The project will involve the collaborative design and development of a social robot capable of interacting with children in Ngukurr (Northern Territory) through language games, as well as the development of tools for community language workers to create tablet-based language teaching materials easily. The project takes CoEDL technology research into the field, and seeks to develop and evaluate engaging ways of teaching and preserving indigenous languages.

Gautier Durantin

Kriol

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2018

Category clustering: Testing the learnability advantage of a typologically preferred language structure - Recent research has shown that in languages with complex word structures, there is a ‘category clustering’ bias to place elements with the same grammatical category in the same position in the word. Most languages conform to this bias, though some languages do not. We hypothesise that most languages have evolved this way because category-clustering is easier to learn and process. In order to test this hypothesis we have devised an artificial language experiment that requires participants to learn one of two invented ‘toy languages’ – one of which has category clustering, and the other of which does not.

John Mansfield

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2017

Contingency in infant-directed speech: Neurophysiological and psycho-social responses in pre-linguistic infants - Recent research has shown that the quality and quantity of speech provided to young infants has long lasting effects on child language learning and processing. Whether the quality or quantity of speech play a more powerful role are yet to be ascertained. This study investigates how the quality of speech affects infant responses in the pre-linguistic period, by comparing infant responses to contingent versus non-contingent infant-directed speech. It is expected that contingent speech will elicit more advanced neurophysiological and psycho-social responses than non-contingent speech in infant and adult listeners.

Christa Lam-Cassettari

Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2016

Conversational Australian English: Analysing Speech Acts in AusTalk Map Tasks - This pilot will identify new ways of mining large speech corpora for specific speech acts (SAs), such as questions, requests for information, and expressions of surprise or agreement/disagreement. It will add to our understanding of how specific SAs are expressed and to our knowledge of the special features of Australian English, especially in conversational speech. As one of the first explorations of the AusTalk corpus using the Alveo virtual laboratory, it will test its potential for language and digital humanities research and lay the grounds for automating the annotation and identification of SAs.

Dominique Estival

Australian English

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Language Documentation

2019

Creating a corpus of Yolŋu commentaries on ancestral art - Twenty video recordings, some in rare and undersdescribed Yolŋu languages have been made in conjunction with an exhibition at Charles Darwin University Art Gallery of 60 bark paintings which were collected at Milingimbi in the 1970s. This project will enable the recordings to be transcribed and translated for the benefit of the descendants of the artsts, for students of Yolŋu languages and culture, and for the texts in seven Yolŋu languages to be made available for analysis and corpus work.

Michael Christie

Yolŋu

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Language Documentation

2018

Deaf signers and hearing speakers in action: Comparing visible bodily actions in a signed and spoken language - This project is the first comparison of deaf Auslan signers and hearing non-signing speakers of Australian English doing the Family Problems Picture Task. It examines how five pairs of signers and five pairs of non-signers combine strategies for telling, showing and doing. Specifically, how signers and speakers create meaningful visible bodily actions with and without speech. This project draws from semiotics, language evolution and corpus linguistics by comparing social cognition data from an endangered, minority signed language with directly comparable data from a powerful spoken language. It will provide crucial insight into understanding the shape and evolution of signed and spoken languages.

Gabrielle Hodge

Auslan

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Language Documentation

2016

Deaf signers in action: Solving the Family Problems task in Auslan - This project is the first descriptive investigation of the language-in-action of deaf Auslan signers as they collaborate on the Family Problems Picture Task. It examines how five pairs of deaf signers combine strategies for telling, showing and doing during the task. Specifically, how signers construct the actions, dialogue, thoughts and emotions of others during their face-to-face interactions. This project builds on work at the intersection of language description, semiotics and corpus linguistics by describing social cognition data from an endangered signed language using corpus methods. This study will provide crucial insight into typological perspectives for understanding the shape of language.

Gabrielle Hodge

Auslan

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2016

Deciphering the great and mysterious singing machine - Singers learn to harness their vocal tract as a tool for sculpting tonally rich vowels. The art of forging a musical instrument by dynamically shaping the speech articulators (tongue, lips, vocal cords, etc.) spans cultures and has deep roots in our prehistory. However, surprisingly little is known about how singers shape their tongues to craft their sound, and even less about how this differs from speaking. This research project will unlock the mysteries of articulation in singing, using electromagnetic articulometry (EMA) and ultrasound technologies to track the tongue shape and lip motions of trained singers as they sing and speak.

Chris Carignan

Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

Develop a mobile application to support the collection of stories in native languages and the sharing of those stories with family members and other interested people - The purpose of this proposal is to develop a mobile application to: 1. support the collection of stories in native languages and the sharing of those stories with family members and other interested people; and, 2. where appropriate consent has been provided, allow use of those recordings by researchers involved in the study of language. The application aims to support the collection and preservation of languages.

Ben Matthes, Stephen Villers

Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

Develop an open source mobile application toolkit to facilitate the comparison of language samples (single words or phrases) for a variety of instructional and therapeutic purposes - We propose to develop an open source mobile application toolkit to facilitate the comparison of language samples (single words or phrases) for a variety of instructional and therapeutic purposes. This research proposal is an offshoot from the recently held Language Hackfest held at The University of Queensland, and the collaborators listed above are part of the same team that collaborated at the Hackfest.

Daniel Angus

Language Documentation

2016

Developing a collection of traditional Lopit Stories - Members of the Lopit community in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya are highly motivated to record stories and descriptions of cultural practices and to support the documentation of their language. This project aims to provide them guidance and support in making quality recordings, via Skype discussions and training materials, and to provide them with some equipment for this work. We will transcribe these recordings and use them to develop print and online language materials and to enhance our own documentation of this undocumented, vulnerable language of South Sudan.

Jonathan Moodie, Rosey Billington

Lopit

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2018

Developing a web-based interface for Persephone, an automatic phoneme transcription tool, with Me'phaa Vátháá, Nafsan, Māori and Bininj Kunwok languages - This project brings together linguists and software developers to (1) iteratively design and develop a web interface for the phonemic transcription program, Persephone; and then (2) evaluate the interface for automatic phonemic transcription for Me'phaa Vátháá, Nafsan, Māori and Bininj Kunwok languages. Persephone's purpose is not to replace a linguist, but rather to produce a first pass phonetic transcription that the language worker can refine. It harnesses recent breakthroughs in machine learning to reduce manual data entry, freeing the linguist to focus on addressing linguistic questions. The web interface will provide access to Persephone for ordinary working linguists.

Ben Foley

Me'phaa Vátháá, Nafsan, Māori, Bininj Kunwok

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2019

Digital IDS - As more people work longer hours in jobs away from home, they turn to using methods of digital communication (e.g., Facetime, Skype) to stay connected with their loved ones. But what impact does that have on communication? Specifically, does a mother’s speech to her baby differ when she uses digital communication compared to face-to-face communication? This project will investigate how digital communication affects infant-directed speech across the first year of life.

Nicole Traynor

Language Documentation

2018

Documentation of Papua New Guinea Sign Language (PNGSL) - In 2015, the Papua New Guinea government made PNGSL the country's fourth official language. Despite this status, it is unclear exactly what PNGSL is. No documentation exists, and while a video-recorded dictionary is in development, this has been criticised by stakeholders as recording signs developed by hearing consultants, rather than the natural language of PNG deaf communities. This project will carry out language documentation among deaf signers in Port Moresby. It will create a basic photographic PNGSL dictionary, which will incorporate and celebrate variation in this dynamic linguistic climate, and support deaf education and rights in Australia's nearest neighbour.

Lauren Reed

Papua New Guinea Sign Language

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Language Documentation

2019

Documenting phonetic and phonological variation in Bislama - Bislama is a creole language which is a lingua franca in Vanuatu, a country of over 130 languages. While Bislama vocabulary mostly originates from English, the grammar and the sound system are more like that of local Oceanic languages. However, it has long been observed that there is considerable variation in the speech sounds used in Bislama, with the linguistic heritage of speakers being an important factor. This project will develop a corpus of Bislama materials which will allow for a quantitative investigation of sociolinguistic variation in Bislama phonetic and phonological patterns, across a diverse group of speakers.

Rosey Billington

Bislama

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Language Documentation

2019

Documenting Sydney Aboriginal English - The study examines the structural ‘distinctness’ of Sydney Aboriginal English and uncovers how this is being maintained in one of the world’s most linguistically diverse, yet English-dominated, metropolises. By producing the first high-quality, mini-corpus of naturalistic Sydney Aboriginal English, this study will systematically investigate (1) the ways in which this variety differs from Standard Australian English, and (2) whether such differences constitute potential contact-induced changes in progress. These findings will be contextualised by a detailed ethnographic examination of language practices to produce a rich picture of the role of minority ethnolects in the modern metropolis.

Sally Dixon

Aboriginal English

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Language Documentation

2020

Documenting the language and culture of Indonesian Bajau communities in North Sulawesi - People known as the Sama-Bajaw, Orang Suku Laut, or 'Sea Gypsies / Sea Nomads', have historically lived large parts of their lives at sea while fishing and free diving for a living. While traditionally found in a region spanning multiple nation states (Malaysia, Indonesia, and The Philippines), many of these communities have now settled, or are being forcibly resettled, into land- based villages. As a result, the linguistic vitality and traditional cultural practices of these communities are under serious threat. This project aims to document aspects of language and culture in three Bajau communities in North Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Timothy Brickell

Tondano, Tonsawang

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2018

Effective Digital Solutions for Sustaining Indigenous Languages - There is a critical need to revitalise and maintain Australia's Indigenous languages while there is still time. Digital technologies make it easy to record spoken language, connect dispersed speaker populations, and support language learning. This project will investigate three questions: (a) what technologies are in regular use and how effective are they? (b) what ideas do community members have for solutions that address unmet needs? (c) what are the criteria for evaluating digital solutions? Working closely with representatives from Indigenous language centres, we will prepare a Compendium of Ideas for Effective Digital Solutions for Sustaining Indigenous Languages.

Steven Bird, Faith Baisden

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2020

Effects of dialect and setting on word stress perception in Indian English - Previous work has shown that word stress in mainstream varieties of English helps listeners identify word boundaries in spoken language. Less is known about dialects of English that emerged in complex multilingual environments, e.g. Indian English, and how speakers of these dialects adapt to new sociolinguistic settings after migration. This project develops an online experimental tool to investigate the perception of word stress by Indian English listeners in India and the diaspora, focusing on recently arrived migrants in Australia (mainstream ‘new’ dialect), the UK (mainstream ‘well-established’ dialect; colonial heritage) and Germany (English as an additional language).

Robert Fuchs

Indian English

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2018

Everyday noise: Do we learn without knowing? Identifying key brain networks present during natural language learning contexts - Understanding how the human brain responds to noise during language learning is critical to predicting brain behaviour during language processing and our capacity to optimise learning strategies. Although it is accepted that noise disrupts cognitive function in many situations, recent work demonstrates that white noise can actually enhance learning. Our study will combine EEG (monitoring electrical brain activity) with brain “connectomics” (computational methods) to challenge the prevailing view that noise is detrimental to spoken language comprehension and verbal learning. Combining EEG with emerging computational connectomics tools will provide deeper insights into how brain networks are shaped during language learning.

Kartik Iyer

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Language Documentation

2020

Extending the documentation of Pa\’umotu dialects - The aim of this project is to add to the documentation of endangered and little-documented Tuamotuan dialects, known as reo Pa’umotu. New material will be collected in the archipelago, transcribed and translated. Recently digitised material collected in the 1980s in four of the nine dialects will also be transcribed and translated. This project involves the training and participation of native speakers of Pa’umotu in annotation tasks. It also contributes to the inception of a contemporary Pa’umotu-French bilingual dictionary, in collaboration with the Pa’umotu Academy. All collected and transcribed material will be deposited in local digital archives and PARADISEC.

Marie-France Duhamel

Pa'umoto

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2018

Forced-alignment protocols for minority languages - Forced-aligners have revolutionised sociophonetics. By automating the process of segmenting a time-aligned orthographic transcription into individual phonemes, they have vastly increased the size of datasets utilised in phonetic work, thereby enhancing the power and sensitivity of analyses conducted. Forced-aligners have mainly been employed for major languages, and there is a paucity of research exploring their utility for lesser-described languages. This project aims to assess the applicability and efficiency of existing forced-aligner technology on lesser-described languages, with the ultimate goals of creating guidelines and tools to assist researchers in preparing these languages for forced-alignment, facilitating and enhancing analyses thereof.

Simon Gonzalez

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

How Culturally-Dependent are Gestural and Vocal Iconicity? - Imagine language was wiped out. Which communication modality is best suited to language creation? In the study proposed, people from different cultures (Vanuatu, Australia) will try to communicate a range of different meanings using gesture or non-linguistic vocalization, and without using their existing language. Their signs will be recorded and people from the same/different culture will try to guess the meaning. We predict that communication success will be higher 1) for gesture and 2) within the same culture. Such findings would support gesture-first accounts of language origins, and the importance of culture to language diversity.

Nicholas Fay

Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

Immersive exploration of linguistic data - As experiential Virtual Reality emerges as a new technology, its full research potential remains untapped. This is an exciting opportunity for CoEDL to achieve the following outcomes: * Experiment with the affordances of 3D virtual reality environments for linguistic data visualisation; * Showcase the range of linguistic data already in PARADISEC and in the future, highlights from the new data collected by CoEDL CIs; * Connect with the general public and with other researchers through the DomeLab Specifically we propose to develop a 3D “walkthrough” of linguistic space and time, using resources from PARADISEC.

Rachel Hendery

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2019

Indian English in the diaspora: A study investigating linguistic modification among new migrants in Australia and the UK - English is notable for its extensive dialectal variation across very diverse speech communities globally. This study examines Indian English spoken in two diverse diaspora locations, Melbourne, Australia and Oxford, the UK, both with large diaspora communities. Indian English is of interest because of the extensive number of its speakers around the world as well as the documented presence of distinct set of pronunciation features making it undoubtedly ‘Indian’. We investigate how recently-arrived speakers of Indian English adapt to two diverse linguistic contexts, which phonetic features they retain signalling their ‘Indian identity’, and which features of the local dialect they adopt.

Olga Maxwell, Elinor Payne

Indian English

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2020

Is cross-situational word learning better in peer or individual learning contexts? - Individual differences in early word-learning have implications for educational and social-emotional outcomes. Early word learning is shaped by individual capacities and social experiences. Currently we understand the role of adults in children’s word-learning, yet we have limited insight into the role of peers. Government initiatives for universal early education have led to expansion of the early childhood education and care sector. In this context children receive linguistic input from and alongside peers. Accordingly, we will examine peer influences on word-learning in 3-5year-old children attending childcare. Additionally, we will examine how individual capacity in theory-of-mind and peer-collaboration influence the propensity for word-learning alongside peers.

Aisling Mulvihill

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2018

Learning language with a robot in the school classroom - This project is a collaboration between CoEDL engineers and CoEDL educators that aims to utilise a robot to support the teaching of language materials within a school classroom. While our previous work demonstrated how digital language resources can be adapted to a robot, further insights from educators, and integration with lesson plans are required for a robot to become an effective learning aid. Both these requirements are crucial to the educational outcomes from the robot, to the repeated use of the robot within a classroom, and to the robot playing a role in revitalisation of a language.

Marie Boden (was Scott Heath)

Kriol

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2018

Linguistic reconstruction in the age of Bayes - While quantitative methods have flourished for language subgrouping, proto-language reconstruction has lacked quantitative measures. We currently have no means of comparing proposed reconstructions objectively. This project will create a pilot system that can gauge the likelihood of a reconstruction given the sound changes it relies on, as a function of the likelihood of those sound changes. These likelihoods we will assess by their attested frequency in a catalogue of sound changes. Assessing the likelihood of both sound changes has significant implications for language acquisition because this is one key locus of language change.

Robert Mailhammer

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

Linguistic Roadshow 2016 - We propose to develop and implement a Linguistics Roadshow: an interactive showcase on the science of language, presenting the big questions and the little-known facts about language for a general audience. The Roadshow will be designed as a form of outreach and community engagement to increase public understanding of the study of language as a varied and exciting scientific endeavour, and to raise the profile of linguistics in Australia. The Roadshow will focus on reaching secondary students in rural schools, for whom there are more limited opportunities to complement existing school curricula, and will be structured as in-school visits in selected locations, with a program of activities, demonstrations, and mini-talks presented by CoEDL researchers. We anticipate that with careful planning and development, in consultation with CoEDL researchers across program areas, it will be possible to establish a standard model and set of accompanying materials for the Linguistics Roadshow, so that it can be easily adopted and used by others to reach more schools across the country. The project is proposed as a 12-month pilot implementation of the Linguistics Roadshow, including visits to Year 10 students at three schools in regional areas, and will have three stages.

Rosey Billington, Katie Jepson, Jill Vaughan

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Language Documentation

2020

Local vs Long-distance processes: Nasals and Nasalization in Arabana - This project aims to advance understanding of sound structures in Australian languages and more generally. It has long been recognised that sounds which are next to one another influence one another, but in different ways in different languages. We have limited information on how adjacent sounds influence one another in Australian languages. Arabana has some unusual patterns with nasal sounds. Phonetic investigation allows us to evaluate potential analyses. The project will work with the last fluent speaker of Arabana to record and analyse new materials on nasals and their environments, providing better materials to both the Arabana and research communities.

Mark Harvey

Arabana

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2017

Look who’s talking: Perceived ethnic background of speaker impacts language learning - Preliminary data revealed that Caucasian participants showed poorer word learning when told novel Dutch words were spoken by someone of Middle Eastern than Caucasian appearance, despite everyone hearing the same stimuli. The possibility that knowledge about the speaker’s ethnic appearance affects language learning has clear application to understanding multicultural communication. To determine whether this stems from knowledge of European versus Middle Eastern languages, or general or specific out-group biases, we will compare language learning from perceived narrators of different ethnic backgrounds by AusE-speakers of different backgrounds, and a population from PNG with limited exposure to people not indigenous to PNG.

Karen Mulak

Dutch

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2020

Making the dictionary work: Community training workshops for the Mudburra dictionary - The Mudburra dictionary was published in 2019. Its completion represented a symbolically important moment in the Mudburra community’s push for language maintenance. For this dictionary to have practical as well as symbolic value, however, potential users must feel confident using it. This project will develop hands-on workshops to familiarise Mudburra community members with the dictionary, its layout, and how they can use it to incorporate more language into their daily lives. The project will also support Indigenous and non-Indigenous school staff by delivering dictionary-based lesson plans and exercises. All workshops and resources will be developed and co-delivered with a Mudburra assistant teacher.

Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway

Mudburra

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

Making ‘Harlie the Chatbot’ accessible to researchers and clinicians - Our team has developed a smartphone application that emulates phone calls from ‘Harlie the Chatbot’, an artificial conversation agent. Within the context of regular phone chats, Harlie can remotely collect specific data (e.g. voice samples) over time from populations of interest. Harlie’s‘brain’ is modifiable. Different brains can be uploaded into the application to address a variety of needs. This project delivers a series of workshops during which interested researchers and clinicians will be guided to create their own ‘brains’ for the Harlie application, tailoring the content and response pattern of the chatbot to their specific field of interest.

David Ireland

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2018

Massive automated morpho-phonological analysis - Linguists are nowadays assembling datasets covering the vocabularies of thousands of the world’s languages, helping us to quantify cross-linguistic variation and infer common ancestral lineages around the world. But words also often have internal structure, as in ‘black-bird’ or ‘fif-ty’, which typically is not explicitly indicated in such datasets but can also reveal historical connections and cross-linguistic patterns. We aim to build computational tools that can discover word structure within large, modern datasets, and build up overviews of how word pieces are assembled, both in terms of their component speech sounds and their meanings, across 270 indigenous languages of Australia.

Erich Round

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2016

Matching curriculum to community goals for Indigenous language revival in Eastern Australia - Many Australian Indigenous communities are seeking to revive their traditional languages, and are gaining support from state Education Departments in this process. However, communities often have little access to research on second language acquisition, and they may have strong views on community ownership of languages, and community control of language programs. This case study aims to investigate the experiences and expectations of a school language revival program. Through a partnership approach with Indigenous community members, this will increase our knowledge of the teaching and learning in Indigenous language revival programs, and how best they can be supported for the future.

Hilary Smith

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Language Documentation

2019

Message sticks: Documenting an Indigenous system of long-distance communication - Message sticks are Indigenous tools of long-distance communication. Carried by special messengers across cultural and linguistic boundaries, the objects were routinely used to support an important oral message, usually a request or declaration. Today, Indigenous communities employ message sticks in more restricted or politically symbolic contexts, however in Maningrida, traditional long-distance interactions are still remembered and reenacted. In collaboration with senior Rembarrnga men, I will document knowledge about message stick use in Arnhem Land. In particular I will probe the pragmatics of the system: the relationship between the oral message, the sequence of motifs and the context of the communicative encounter.

Piers Kelly

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Language Documentation

2017

Metrical Prominence and Pre-stopping in Arabana - This project aims to advance analyses of the unusual patterns that word stress shows in Australian languages. Stress most consistently affects consonants following rather preceding the stressed vowel. Arabana is a language which shows particularly strong and cross-linguistically rare effects, extending to the pronunciation of following consonants, technically known as pre-stopping. The project will work with the last fluent speaker of Arabana to record new materials on pre-stopping, and undertake modern phonetic analyses of both new and existing materials. This will assist in providing better quality materials to the Arabana community, and in developing analyses of stress in Australian languages.

Mark Harvey

Arabana

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2020

Monitoring as a Driver of Differential Language Change - When languages share speakers one observed outcome is that their vocabulary differentiates while their structure converges. A monitoring process in bilingual speakers has been proposed as the mechanism responsible for vocabularies becoming more distinct over time. Words shared across a bilingual’s languages are selected less often than language distinctive words because they are ambiguous in their language membership and may be avoided in favour of an unambiguous synonym. Could monitoring also explain convergence in structure? In this study we test the hypothesis that different change outcomes for form/structure result from differences in our ability to monitor for these two levels.

Luisa Miceli

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

Neural entrainment to speech rhythm - Recent research has shown that oscillations in the brain function to segment the continuous speech into syllable-sized units through a process known as neural entrainment. However the picture is not clear because the unit of segmentation depends on the rhythm of the particular language. This study investigates whether neural entrainment is language specific in adult listeners of three rhythmically different languages (English, French and Japanese) and whether infants also have language specific neural entrainment.

Varghese Peter

Language Documentation

2019

Obstruents vs sonorants: Arabana apicals - This project aims to advance understanding of sound structures in Australian languages and more generally. It has long been recognized that sounds do not differ randomly from one another. Rather, groups of sounds behave together in systematic ways, but it is not clear precisely how sounds group together. Arabana has an unusual set of tongue-tip sounds. Their phonetic investigation allows us to evaluate different hypotheses on how sounds group together. The project will work with the last fluent speaker of Arabana to record and analyse new materials on tongue-tip sounds, providing better materials to both the Arabana and research communities.

Mark Harvey

Arabana

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2016

Perception of Intonational Contrasts in Varieties of Indian English - Languages vary in how they use melody and intonation, and in their use of acoustic cues to cue meaningful intonational contrasts. As these aspects of language are learnt early in life, listeners tend to process intonational contrasts (that signal given versus new information, for example) less efficiently when speaking a second language. This study extends our understanding of the perception of intonation and looks at the ways speakers of Indian English perceive intonational contrasts, the kinds of cues they rely on and to what extent their judgement is affected by their first language/s and the variety they are exposed to. These questions are important for intercultural communication, especially in the Australian multicultural setting.

Olga Maxwell

Indian English

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

Picture-Naming, Synonymy and Language Divergence in Bilinguals - A researcher gives you a card and asks you to name what’s on it – in English. You say banana. There’s no alternative. Another picture: do you choose aubergine or eggplant? If you’re a French-English bilingual, aubergine may seem more French than English. What do you do? Past picture-naming studies have used pictures like banana – avoiding choice – and report that shared words are favoured. Studies with choice show shared words are avoided. This project extends picture-naming to cases like aubergine; understanding bilingual processing better may tell us whether bilingualism makes languages more or less alike.

Mark Ellison

Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2020

Pictures and Pedagogy: Creating shared picture-based language learning resources - Illustrated learner’s dictionaries and picture-based activities are important in a language teacher’s toolkit. The implementation of the Australian Curriculum has prompted a rise in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language programs in Australian schools, however Indigenous language teacher training, teaching resources and guides remain scarce, motivating the investigation and creation of practical, usable and sharable resources. This project will investigate and create two related sets of resources, informed by educator’s practices and needs, lexicographic research and language documentation. They are (i) a teacher’s resource guide to picture- and picture-dictionary-based teaching activities, (ii) a corpus of line-drawn illustrations.

Samantha Disbray

Language Documentation

2018

Pilot digital archive of historical sources in Australian languages - Historical documentation of Australian languages – which extends back to the late 18th century – is a valuable resource for linguists, historians of science and present-day language speakers. Such documentation can provide insights into language change, reveal details of earlier linguists' approach and methods, and aid in language revitalisation and revival efforts. This pilot project aims to create an online digital archive of historical sources in Australian languages in which these groups can access materials.

James McElvenny

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2020

Rethinking Software for Co-Research with Diverse Communities in the Digital Age - This project documents the range of available software platforms and tools used by social science researchers for work and collaboration with diverse communities. We consider common ethical issues that researchers, community members, and technologists are concerned about, and map them to functionalities of existing software, so that future researchers can easily find software that helps them carry out necessary research tasks while adhering to ethical requirements. In doing so, we identify gaps in ethical and accessible functionality for different population groups across existing platforms, so that we can better design software of the future that fulfils these needs.

Rachel Hendery

Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

Shifting perspectives and cross-pollinating research on contact languages in Northern Australia - This project develops new methodologies that scale-up studies of variation in Kriol and other contact varieties spoken in northern Australia. It creates an artificial fieldsite with speakers of Kriol and other contact varieties from the north, replicating the contact language profile of northern Australia in a single small-scale workshop, in which variation is approached from emic perspectives. The workshop, conducted in the heart of Kriol country in Katherine (Northern Territory), is transdisciplinary, involving research from three CoEDL programs Shape (corpus building, multi-varietal documentation), Learning (language acquisition and socialisation) and Evolution (sociolinguistic variation). It takes CoEDL into the field”, enhances CoEDL research with a fertile environment for cross-pollinating research and raises the involvement of Indigenous co-researchers and research participants to a new level.

Greg Dickson

Kriol

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Language Documentation

2018

Singers and composers: Ngarinyin conceptualisations of authorship and performance as a window onto metapragmatics - The Ungarinyin language uses the same structure to express the meaning of sentences such as ‘he thinks I will come’ and ‘he says I will come’. Even though this means that the language cannot explicitly distinguish between holding an idea in one’s head and expressing it as an utterance, understanding this distinction is central to Ungarinyin speech culture, but is not easily discussed in relation to language. In this project we record speakers discussing a parallel distinction: the difference between composing and singing songs. We suggest that this will throw new light onto the Ungarinyin metapragmatics.

Stef Spronck

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2017

Sociophonetic variation in first- and second-generation Australians’ English and community language - The proposed project investigates how first- and second-generation bilingual immigrants vary in their use of English and community language. Documenting how different language varieties interact is important because such interactions shape the Australian linguistic landscape, and it helps us understand how multiple languages work within one individual. I will apply variationist methods and employ innovative data collection and analysis methods to build a unique spoken bilingual corpus, and I will run a perception experiment which will tap into the effect of different linguistic and social variables on bilinguals’ language processing.

Ksenia Gnevsheva

Australian English

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Language Documentation

2016

Songs in the Aboriginal Languages of Victoria: Linguistic and Musicological Analysis - Traditional songs in Victorian Aboriginal Languages were recorded from 1840 to 1965. Some of these were accompanied by rich detailed information about social and ritual context, particularly those noted by R.H. Mathews, A.W. Howitt, Rev. William Thomas and Luise Hercus. Most songs are in manuscripts but many of these sources are not yet comprehensively searched. Our proposal will employ the considerable skills of Ted Ryan to further explore the manuscripts, identify songs and contextual information and carefully transcribe them, leading to a substantial monograph with linguistic, and where possible musicological, analysis of these songs, grounded in their contextual background.

Stephen Morey

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

Structured study of the use of an Indigenous language to deliver the PA test instructions to students for whom the language is their L1 - This project will be a structured study of the use of an Indigenous language to deliver the PA test instructions to students for whom the language is their L1. This will be conducted shortly after the same students have received the same test in English. We will compare the results achieved by students when given the test instructions in their L1 and in English as an L2. The main aim of the project will be to develop a protocol for the translation of test instructions, and to standardise how L1 educators will present the test, thus ensuring similar treatments across sites, rather than the current ad hoc approach.

Rebecca Green, Claire Salter

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2020

The impact of music and musical abilities on cross-situational word learning - Previous research has established that music and musical abilities can be beneficial for the development of non-musical cognitive domains, for example linguistic and phonological encoding abilities. Of particular interest to this project is to investigate whether language learning processes are similar to those of music; whether such processes are affected by music and whether they are facilitated by musical abilities. So far, research has mostly used explicit learning methods, we are interested to investigate whether music and musical abilities impact implicit language learning. The results of this research will uncover useful learning strategies that can be applied for educational development.

Eline Smit

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2016

The influence of environment on global patterns of language diversity - Why do some places on earth have so many languages, while others have few? Some spatial patterns in language diversity resemble patterns of biological diversity. For example, languages, like species, are more diverse in the tropics. Such patterns have led to hypotheses that similar environmental features affect both biodiversity and language diversity. Other hypotheses focus on human-specific traits such as agricultural growing season or ease of movement. This project represents a unique collaboration between evolutionary biologists, ecologists and linguists to develop new analytical methods applied on a global scale to test hypotheses concerning environmental influences on language diversity.

Lindell Bromham

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

The Interaction Between Language and Attention - Humans map abstract concepts into perceptual space. We refer to someone who is happy as up, describe someone who is condescending as looking down upon others, and we look forward to the future or back in time. The systematic associations between concepts and space have been measured in studies of conceptual cueing, the phenomenon whereby exposure to a particular concept word orients visual attention in space. To test this, we will test 30 native speakers with cues in Mandarin, and observe the mapping that occurs relative to 30 native English speakers with cues in English.

Stephanie Goodhew

Mandarin, Australian English

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Language Documentation

2018

The interplay of morphosyntax and prosody in the expression of focus in Ashaninka - The project provides a comprehensive analysis of the interaction of morphology, word order, and prosody in the expression of focus in Ashaninka, a Kampa Arawak language of Peru. The project will allow us to understand better how speakers of languages with complex morphology and verb-initial word order use prosody to highlight information in discourse. The project will contribute to the ongoing Ashaninka documentation and language maintenance project (carried out by the applicant Elena Mihas) by providing invaluable sound and text materials and training to the local bilingual teachers.

Elena Mihas

Ashaninka

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

The perception of a sound change in progress: Two minority communities and their participation in established vowel merger in Southern - It has been well documented for a range of languages and language varieties that the ‘shape’ of speech sounds used in everyday communication can influence the way listeners process or understand spoken language. This project focuses on whether a sound change that occurs in the mainstream (i.e. Anglo-celtic) Standard Australian English speaking community is present in two minority communities.

Debbie Loakes, John Hajek

Australian English

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2018

The role of technology in challenging word learning scenarios - Technology has become pivotal in children’s education. However, technology has been cited as a poor educational tool in contrast to face-to-face interaction. Social robots boast features such as joint attention and heightened engagement, compared to other technologies, that may increase educational impact. Our study will investigate whether children can learn to associate novel words and objects based on medium of instruction. The medium will be either a robot with different levels of social ability, an iPad or a person. This project will bring together an interdisciplinary team of psychologists, linguists and roboticists from different nodes, programs and threads of CoEDL.

Kristyn Hensby

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2020

Towards a collaborative workshop concept for the development of culturally responsive visual materials for language pedagogy - The visual reinforcement of learning resources, such as illustrated dictionaries and interactive fiction, is a standard practice in many language learning contexts. This project investigates the effective use of visual language in pedagogical materials and establishes guidelines for the collaborative development of language learning resources for Australian Aboriginal communities. These guidelines, in combination with a set of reflective practices for workshop purposes, are intended to support the work of language resource developers who aspire to collaborate on the design of materials that follow culturally appropriate visual language strategies, thus increasing accessibility, authenticity, and efficacy to foster the language learning process.

Kathrin Kaiser, Haoyi Li

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2019

Towards an extensible, open-source picture dictionary template and processing system - While smartphones have made it trivial to deliver media-enriched text data, the time and labour required for producing well-curated language, audio, and graphics can still be highly cost-prohibitive. Further, even once the language and multimedia data are collected, there remain significant time and personnel costs to process, assemble, and present these data within a mobile-friendly format. Through the digital transformation of two print picture dictionaries and open-sourcing the data entry template, illustrations, and the data processing pipeline, this project will alleviate a significant number of these costs, facilitating the production of digital picture dictionaries for languages across Australia and beyond.

Nay San

Warumungu, Kaytetye

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2018

Tracking evolution in speech perception: A longitudinal intra-listener study - This project offers a rare opportunity to analyse processing behaviour through analysis of longitudinal data. It is concerned with how consistent people's behaviour is over time when categorising vowels – in general, and crucially in the context of a sound change in progress. The longitudinal data comprise responses to a listening test, from mainstream Australian listeners (2012, 2015 and through this project 2018) and Aboriginal English listeners (2016, now 2018). Longitudinal data such as this provides a unique opportunity to address the intersection of language processing and language evolution, and to assess whether any change over time is categorical or incremental.

Debbie Loakes

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2016

Tracking statistical learning through cross-domain pitch processing - Humans have a remarkable capability of tracking statistical regularities from the ambient environment to infer knowledge, a process termed statistical learning. Many questions remain unanswered with respect to the scope and domain-specificity of statistical learning, specifically: How exactly do infants process statistical information across time? Is the pitch processing network in language shared or distinct from that in music over the course of statistical learning? Moreover, can statistical learning tell us something about the origin of language? In this project, we will explore infants’ linguistic and musical pitch processing using a statistical learning paradigm to answer core questions regarding a fundamental cognitive mechanism and its implications for language learning, processing and evolution.

Liquan Liu

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

Trialing a chat-bot for the automated remote collection of longitudinal samples of voice, speech and pseudo-naturalistic conversations - Australia is facing a significant increase in individuals aged 65+ (www.abs.gov.au/ausstats), accompanied by an unprecedented proportion of the population living with dementia and Parkinson’s disease, prominent in the elderly. As early as 2029, the health care system will not be equipped with sufficient human carers to meet the rising demands, e.g., health care workers for people with dementia will be short by 150,000 people (www.fightdementia.org.au). Such predictions have sparked increasing interest in the development of mobile health technologies that can assist in monitoring a multitude of functions and interact with patients on a carer’s behalf. The proposed project will use an artificial intelligence conversation agent with natural language processing abilities (called a “chat-bot”) that can remotely interact with individuals for the purpose of collecting data. The focus of this project is to collect high quality (uncompressed) voice, speech and language data in healthy ageing individuals as a precursor to applying the chat-bot to monitor clinical populations.

Christina Atay

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

Trialling the use of the Aikuma application in a remote Indigenous Australian Community (Warruwi) - In this project, Bird (one of the Aikuma developers), O'Keeffe, Singer and Kapitonov (a CoEDL PhD student) will trial Aikuma in the remote Indigenous community of Warruwi , Goulburn Island (Northern Territory). We will train community members to use Aikuma to record multiple oraltranslations of existing Kunbarlang language recordings. There are approximately 70 hours of Kunbarlang audio recordings archived (including video), but only around 10 hours of these are fully transcribed and translated. There are fewer than 20 remaining full speakers of Kunbarlang so the need to transcribe and translate these recordings is urgent. The aim of this project is to coordinate the recording of Kunbarlang re-speakings and English translations for 15 hours of data.

Isabel O'Keeffe, Steven Bird, Ruth Singer & Ivan Kapitonov

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2018

Ultrasound tongue imaging in production and perception: implications for second language and second dialect acquisition - Ultrasound tongue imaging uses general medical ultrasound technology to image movements of the tongue during speech. This research will draw on a large corpus of ultrasound recordings from Irish and Chinese migrants, and mainstream Australian English speakers, to find out whether prolonged exposure to Australian English results in adoption of more Australian-like pronunciation and articulation. This will be supported by a listening exercise, whereby people will listen to and make judgements about samples of recorded speech from the corpus. The study will help determine which articulatory and acoustic correlates are important for listeners when they process speech by L2 speakers.

Chloé Diskin

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2018

Understanding dementia and ageing experiences of Indigenous Australians: An appreciative inquiry - Indigenous Australians experience dementia at five times the general population rates. It is a national health priority with issues of education and care provision highlighted. There is not a word for dementia within Indigenous Australian languages, and preferred ways of communication and support are not widely understood. To deliver optimal care, understanding how dementia is conceptualised and how to optimally communicate is essential. Yet Indigenous beliefs and practices around dementia have not been embedded within formal Aged Care. This study aims to explore how dementia and ageing are described and understood and what is working well for Indigenous Australians.

Jacki Liddle

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2017

Using Brain-Computer Interfaces to measure, predict and boost individual language learning - Tailoring individual neural technology has long been the playground of prosthetic engineering and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Such interfaces use electrical signals from the brain to control a device (active BCIs) or estimate the mental state of the user (passive BCIs). The rise of passive BCIs brings new opportunities for language learning, as predicting an individual’s capabilities for language learning could be used to adapt current language-learning technologies. Our study will combine individuals’ neural measurements in language perception and production to predict individual language learning. We will analyse EEG and behavioural data concurrently, focusing on within-participant analyses to develop adaptive technologies.

Alba Tuninetti

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

Why do language families vary so much in their diversity? - This cross-disciplinary collaboration between evolutionary biologists and linguists explores one potential influence on rate of language diversification. We ask whether a faster rate of word change within a population over time contributes to a greater rate of formation of new languages, and therefore a more diverse language group. This project links micro-level population changes to macro-level processes in language diversification.

Xia Hua

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2015

Word-learning processes in monolingual and bilingual infants - Bilingual infants face the complex task of simultaneously acquiring two linguistic systems. The microsystems of their two languages (i.e., phonology, syntax, lexicon) interplay and impact upon each other, but bilingualism is also reflected in more general cognitive and learning processes, not language-specific processes, nor processes necessarily specific to linguistic processing. This gives rise to an intricate dynamic system – where increasing linguistic experience shapes learning mechanisms, which in turn, have impact on language-specific acquisition. We propose that the first step to understanding bilingual development is to define the learning mechanisms in the bilingual language-learning arsenal. Are monolingual and bilingual infants able to exploit the same language acquisition mechanisms, or do different mechanisms emerge as a product of their individual linguistic experience? This project investigates the disambiguation effect.

Marina Kalashnikova

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Transdisciplinary & Innovation

2017

'I can hear that language but I can’t speak it’: assessing receptive competence in Mawng at Warruwi Community (Australia) - ‘Do you speak French?’ we might be asked, to assess our knowledge of French. The word ‘speak’ is used as shorthand for linguistic knowledge. However it is possible understand a language well without being able to speak it. Hidden language knowledge like this plays an important role in many multilingual settings. At Warruwi Community in Arnhem Land, people often understand a number of Indigenous languages very well, in addition to those they can speak. We know very little about what kind of linguistic knowledge people have, who only ‘hear’ a language. This research will help us find out more about how the brain processes language and how languages change over time.

Ruth Singer

Mawng

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