[Lingtyp] Call for Collaborators on Language Acquisition Project

[Shanley Allen]

Dear colleagues
 
Ben Ambridge at the University of Manchester is seeking potential collaborators for a grant application for a large crosslinguistic project investigating children’s acquisition of inflectional morphology. We aim to include 12-15 typologically-diverse languages. Due to the size of the envisaged project, it would not be feasible to apply for funding for full-time research assistants to test children (or to fund a portion of each collaborator’s salary). Instead, our intention for the grant application is that each collaborator will be able to claim up to €50k for expenses (e.g., travel, laptops, participant payments, part-time/casual researchers), with the data to be collected by a researcher who is already primarily sponsored/employed (e.g., as PhD student, postdoc or research assistant) at your institution. We will provide computerized elicitation tasks; your role (with the help of full-time research and support staff employed at our end) would be to adapt the task for your language and inflectional system and to supervise data collection (with children aged 3-6, and adults).
 
In particular, we are looking for languages with one or more (ideally several) of the following properties:
 
(1) uses prefixes, infixes or some combination (rather than only suffixes) to mark tense/person/number/case, (2) has low syncretism, (3) has high flexivity, (4) uses monoexponential (or separative) morphemes rather than polyexponential (or cumulative) morphemes, (5) uses isolating or nonlinear (ablaut/tonal) morphology (as opposed to/as well as concatenative morphology), (6) has multiple gender categories beyond masculine/feminine/neuter, (7) marks aspect (with or without also marking tense), (8) has dual-number (or similar), as opposed to just singular/plural, (9) has verb agreement for OBJECTs instead of/as well as SUBJECTS, (10) uses a (split-)ergative system rather than nominative-accusative, (11) has an unusually high or low number of noun cases (as opposed to the typical 6-7), (12) has case markers that can be attached to other elements of Noun Phrases, not just nouns.
 
Ideally, the language should also have some kind of corpus that will allow us to estimate the frequency of different inflected verb and noun forms (ideally child-directed-speech, but adult-to-adult speech is also possible); and ideally you would have some experience of running production studies with the relevant population.
 
For more information, please email Ben.Ambridge at Manchester.ac.uk <mailto:Ben.Ambridge at Manchester.ac.uk>
Thanks
Ben
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