Central Australian Study/SHOEBOX

[PatrickMcConvell]

Dear colleagues,

I wish to announce a new study which has been funded by the Australian Research Council for the period 2003-6. Its title is

How mixed language input affects child language development: case studies from Central Australia

We are keen to hear from other people carrying out studies involving Indigenous and endangered languages, with code mixing a significant factor, and 'bush' settings and cultures significantly different from those in most language acquisition studies involved.

We are just tooling up and want to learn more about CHILDES so if there are any CHILDES experts in Australia or the region who could perhaps help us with a workshop, let us know. We are having a meeting in March in Melbourne where we hope to discuss these issues.

Most field linguists here tend to use SHOEBOX for transcription so if anyone has any experience or knowledge of the interaction of CHILDES and SHOEBOX that would be a big help.

Here is a little more about the aims of the project:

This project will involve case studies of three Aboriginal communities designed to address the following questions:
RQ1: what kind of language input do indigenous Australian Aboriginal children receive from traditional indigenous languages, Kriol and varieties of English, and from code-switching involving these languages as used by adults and older children?
RQ2: what  effect does this have on the childrens language acquisition and how the input is reflected in their productive output?
RQ3: what are the processes of language shift, maintenance and change which may be hypothesised to result from this multilingual environment,as evidenced by the childrens input and output and the degree to which this reflects transmission of the target languages, the loss of
traditional languages, or the emergence of new mixed languages?
To address the complexity of these questions, this project brings together people with expertise in three different, but related, fields: Central Australian languages (Simpson, Charola and Moses), first language acquisition (Wigglesworth), and historical change and language maintenance (Simpson).  They will collect the data for the study by identifying the kinds of interactions young children are involved in, the language they use at different ages, and the breadth and variety of language the children are hearing.

Patrick McConvell
Research Fellow, Language and Society
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
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