Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol are mixed languages which are spoken in northern Australia. They systematically mix the lexicon and morpho-syntax of a traditional Australian language (Warlpiri and ...Gurindji) and an Australian contact variety (Kriol), bringing systems from the source languages into functional competition. With respect to argument disambiguation, both Warlpiri and Gurindji use a case marking system, whereas Kriol relies on word order. These two systems of argument marking came into contact and competition in the formation of the mixed languages. The result has been the emergence of word order as the dominant system of argument disambiguation in the mixed language, the optionality of the ergative marker, and a shift in the function of the ergative marker to accord discourse prominence to the agentivity of a nominal.
In situations of language endangerment, the ability to understand a language tends to persevere longer than the ability to speak it. As a result, the possibility of language revival remains high even ...when few speakers remain. Nonetheless, this potential requires that those with high levels of comprehension received sufficient input as children for the activation of speech to occur in later life. In many areas of Australia, input to children of traditional Aboriginal languages is rarely monolingual, but rather often mixed with a contact variety of English. Thus, it is not clear whether children receive enough input to later become active speakers of the traditional languages. This paper reports on a study which tested the relationship between language comprehension and child language input. A vocabulary test of 40 items was administered to 52 Gurindji participants in five age groups. Participants were asked to listen to a Gurindji word and choose a corresponding picture. The test items were graded as high, medium or low frequency on the basis of their use in a corpus of Gurindji child-input speech. We found that age and frequency of use in child-directed speech significantly altered the chance of a correct response.
Gurindji Kriol is a mixed language spoken in northern Australia. It is derived from Gurindji, a Pama-Nyungan language, and Kriol, an English-lexifier creole language. Despite these clear sources, ...Gurindji Kriol contains grammatical systems which are not found in Gurindji or Kriol, for example asymmetrical serial verb constructions. The origin of these constructions is unclear given that Kriol only contains a very limited set of serial verb constructions and they are not found in Gurindji. The development of asymmetrical serial verb constructions is examined and it is suggested that they are a product of the more restricted Kriol serial verb construction developing and expanding under the influence of the Gurindji complex verb. The formation of this construction was a part of the more general genesis of the mixed language which was derived from code-switching.
Neo-Whorfians argue that the structures our language uses to encode spatial relations influence the way we conceptualise space. One explicit test of this link has been studies of how speakers of ...different languages configure arrays of objects in non-linguistic rotation tasks. Subjects perform these tasks differently depending on their dominant linguistic frame of reference: relative e.g. left/right terms, or absolute e.g. N/S/W/E terms. One prediction is that changes in the linguistic system should result in corresponding cognitive changes. Such a linguistic shift has occurred among Gurindji people (Australia). Traditionally Gurindji people used a system of cardinal directions, however many have now also been exposed to the English left/right system. This paper demonstrates that this language difference is reflected cognitively. The ‘Animals-in-a-row’ task was administered to 107 Gurindji people. The results show strong ‘viewpoint independent’ responses, nonetheless those with a Tertiary education gave significantly more ‘viewpoint dependent’ responses which we attribute to exposure to English, and perhaps associated literacy practices.
•Neo-Whorfians claim that the structures our language uses to encode spatial relations influence how we conceptualise space.•We tested 107 Gurindji people using the ‘Animals-in-a-row’ rotation task.•We argue that the majority ‘viewpoint independent’ responses is a function of the continued reliance on Gurindji cardinals in large scale space.•The high number of ‘viewpoint dependent’ responses are a function of exposure to English literacy.
•We describe phonological forms and perceived functions of Gurindji baby talk.•Phonological reductions resemble child speech, including coronal neutralization.•Baby talk seems to function to hold ...attention and encourage child imitation.•Baby talk to Gurindji children, and its functions, are explored for the first time.•Results show how baby talk reflects culturally-specific contexts for acquisition.
Baby talk is an aspect of infant- or child-directed speech where caregivers imitate children's immature productions in stylized form. Within non-generativist approaches to language acquisition, children's language acquisition is often viewed an emergent response to a highly patterned linguistic environment, at least some of which is tailored by caregivers to children's cognitive and social needs. Some cross-cultural research, however, has disputed whether caregivers modify speech to children in all cultures, and whether or to what extent special infant- or child-directed speech is necessary for successful language acquisition. In this paper we present new cross-linguistic and cross-cultural data on baby talk or janyarrp among Gurindji people. Using a corpus of naturalistic family interactions and interviews with Gurindji people of northern Australia we describe the phonological modifications and specific lexicon of baby talk and investigate its possible functions. Several phonological reductions were found which are familiar from baby talk and child speech in other languages, including rhotic replacement and cluster reduction. More unusually, baby talk neutralizes the three-way coronal contrast in Gurindji Kriol, the language which Gurindji children learn at home. The functions of baby talk for Gurindji people likewise seem to comprise familiar baby talk functions like holding attention as well as less familiar functions, such facilitating children's imitations in production.
Crosslinguistic influence has been seen in bilingual adult and child learners when compared to monolingual learners. For speakers of Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol there is no monolingual group ...for comparison, yet crosslinguistic influence can be seen in how the speakers resolve competition between case-marking and word order systems in each language. Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol are two new Australian mixed languages, spoken in similar, yet slightly different, sociolinguistic contexts, and with similar, yet slightly different, argument marking systems. The different sociolinguistic situations and systems of argument marking lead to a difference in how speakers of each language interpret simple transitive sentences in a comprehension task. Light Warlpiri speakers rely on ergative case-marking as an indicator of agents more often than Gurindji Kriol speakers do. Conversely, Gurindji Kriol speakers rely on word order more often than Light Warlpiri speakers do.
We discuss two unrelated languages, Jingulu (Mirndi, non-Pama-Nyungan) and Mudburra (Ngumpin-Yapa, Pama-Nyungan), which have been in contact for 200-500 years. The language contact situation is ...unusual cross-linguistically due to the high number of shared nouns, tending to an almost shared noun lexicon. Even more unusually, this lexicon was formed by borrowing in both directions at a relatively equal rate. The aim of this paper is to extend the bidirectional noun borrowing results to the verbal systems of Jingulu and Mudburra to determine whether a similarly high rate of borrowing occurred, and if so, whether it was similarly bidirectional. The high degree of shared Jingulu-Mudburra verb forms was first observed by Pensalfini who claimed that Jingulu and Mudburra lexical verbs are almost entirely cognate across these two languages. This paper aims to quantify the degree of shared verb forms and determine the direction of borrowing between Mudburra and Jingulu. We first establish shared forms and then determine the origins of the forms based on a comparative database of verbs from geographic and phylogenetic neighbours (Wambaya, Gurindji and Jaminjung).
Distributional learning is a proposal for how infants might learn early speech sound categories from acoustic input before they know many words. When categories in the input differ greatly in ...relative frequency and overlap in acoustic space, research in bilingual development suggests that this affects the course of development. In the present study we describe the nature and extent of vowel variation in nearly 900 vowel tokens in maternal speech in Gurindji Kriol, a mixed language of northern Australia, which, like bilingual input, has differences in the relative frequency of adjacent, overlapping vowel categories. In Analysis 1, we provide the first systematic account of vowel variation and phone frequency in maternal speech in Gurindji Kriol. In Analysis 2, cluster analysis was applied to the vowel formant and duration data, to see what categories might emerge from acoustic data alone. The results suggest that, were infants to base their initial vowel categories solely on the clusters emerging in acoustic space, they might likely set up relatively few vowel categories. We discuss implications for how infants may learn Gurindji Kriol and for distributional learning.
This study tests the effect of multilingualism and language contact on consonant perception. Here, we explore the emergence of phonological stratification using two alternative forced-choice (2afc) ...identification task experiments to test listener perception of stop voicing with contrasting minimal pairs modified along a 10-step continuum. We examine a unique language ecology consisting of three languages spoken in Northern Territory, Australia: Roper Kriol (an English-lexifier creole language), Gurindji (Pama-Nyungan), and Gurindji Kriol (a mixed language derived from Gurindji and Kriol). In addition, this study focuses on three distinct age groups: children (group i, 8>), preteens to middle-aged adults (group ii, 10-58), and older adults (group iii, 65+). Results reveal that both Kriol and Gurindji Kriol listeners in group ii contrast the labial series p and b. Contrarily, while alveolar t and velar k were consistently identifiable by the majority of participants (74%), their voiced counterparts (d and g) showed random response patterns by 61% of the participants. Responses to the voiced stimuli from the preteen-adult Kriol group were, however, significantly more consistent than in the Gurindji Kriol group, suggesting Kriol listeners may be further along in acquiring the voicing contrast. Significant results regarding listener exposure to Standard English in both language groups also suggests constant exposure to English maybe a catalyst for setting this change in motion. The more varied responses from the Gurindji, Kriol, and Gurindji Kriol listeners in groups ii and iii, who have little exposure to English, help support these findings.
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