Catching criminals by their voice - combining automatic and traditional forensic speaker identification methods for optimum performance. Key benefits of the project will be improvement in national security; substantial savings in Court time and expenditure, and Legal Aid funding; and, most importantly, improvement in the equity and efficiency of Australia's Criminal Justice System.
Understanding communication about advance care planning across the lifespan. This project aims to understand how people communicate about advance care planning for children, adolescents, and adults. This project expects to generate new knowledge by using leading social scientific and linguistic methods to analyse real-world advance care planning conversations and documents. Expected outcomes include detailed knowledge about challenges people encounter in these conversations and how to manage the ....Understanding communication about advance care planning across the lifespan. This project aims to understand how people communicate about advance care planning for children, adolescents, and adults. This project expects to generate new knowledge by using leading social scientific and linguistic methods to analyse real-world advance care planning conversations and documents. Expected outcomes include detailed knowledge about challenges people encounter in these conversations and how to manage these challenges. Over 170,000 Australians die each year, most from serious illness. This project should provide significant benefits to future initiatives for enhancing communication about advance care planning, especially in relation to young Australians, older Australians, and Australians with disabilities.Read moreRead less
Languages of Barrier Islands, Sumatra: Description, History and Typology. This project aims to investigate endangered languages of the Asia-Pacific via four undocumented languages in the Barrier Islands, Indonesia. New knowledge will be generated into the languages, cultures and societies of the region on an unprecedented scale, and be made freely available to the public. New data will uncover past migration patterns in Southeast Asia, advance language theory (such as linguistic typology and lan ....Languages of Barrier Islands, Sumatra: Description, History and Typology. This project aims to investigate endangered languages of the Asia-Pacific via four undocumented languages in the Barrier Islands, Indonesia. New knowledge will be generated into the languages, cultures and societies of the region on an unprecedented scale, and be made freely available to the public. New data will uncover past migration patterns in Southeast Asia, advance language theory (such as linguistic typology and language change), and support the computational modelling of Austronesian for future language technologies. Connections with Indonesian institutions will strengthen Australia’s regional engagement, and support language revitalisation and maintenance among minority communities for the preservation of their culture and history.Read moreRead less
Linguistic Typology and the Demise of Morphological Case: The Development of the Genitive in the Germanic Languages. This project will investigate how changes to the case marking systems of the Germanic languages affected the expression of the relationships originally encoded by genitive case. New data will be gathered concerning changes in Dutch and English. The investigation will then be extended to the other Germanic languages. A primary aim of the project is to present a case study of how ....Linguistic Typology and the Demise of Morphological Case: The Development of the Genitive in the Germanic Languages. This project will investigate how changes to the case marking systems of the Germanic languages affected the expression of the relationships originally encoded by genitive case. New data will be gathered concerning changes in Dutch and English. The investigation will then be extended to the other Germanic languages. A primary aim of the project is to present a case study of how closely related languages can diverge significantly while undergoing a similar shift from one overall ?type? to another, adding to our understanding of what sort of changes the human language capability allows in the transmission of language across generations.Read moreRead less
The building blocks of meaning: a linguistic approach. This project will investigate how complex meanings are built up from more basic building blocks, and to what extent basic meanings differ between different languages, cultures, and geographical zones. The project is expected to lead to significant advances in the scientific knowledge of language. Nothing comparable has been attempted before. Expected outcomes include a rich harvest of new knowledge, digital tools to assist with analysing and ....The building blocks of meaning: a linguistic approach. This project will investigate how complex meanings are built up from more basic building blocks, and to what extent basic meanings differ between different languages, cultures, and geographical zones. The project is expected to lead to significant advances in the scientific knowledge of language. Nothing comparable has been attempted before. Expected outcomes include a rich harvest of new knowledge, digital tools to assist with analysing and translating complex meanings, and ongoing international collaborations. This will provide significant benefits such as enabling messaging and communication in education, health care, service delivery and international affairs to be clearer, more accessible and more translatable.Read moreRead less
Voices of Regional Australia: The linguistic patterning of local attachment. This project aims to investigate language and social dynamics among regional Australians, who, despite representing one third of the population, have been often neglected in the research to date. The project expects to generate new knowledge around regional attachment and the impact that has on speech patterns, adapting for the first time recently developed international metrics to the Australian context. Expected outco ....Voices of Regional Australia: The linguistic patterning of local attachment. This project aims to investigate language and social dynamics among regional Australians, who, despite representing one third of the population, have been often neglected in the research to date. The project expects to generate new knowledge around regional attachment and the impact that has on speech patterns, adapting for the first time recently developed international metrics to the Australian context. Expected outcomes include a better understanding of models of language change across urban and rural areas, and a novel dataset recording the stories of regional Australians, and in particular, their experiences facing bushfire. This should provide significant benefits as a record of life, language and community in regional Australia.Read moreRead less
Trauma memory and narrative structure in post-traumatic distress. The project enhances understanding of factors that maintain enduring distress and disability following traumatic experiences which have major social and financial costs to individuals, communities and to the nation. Better knowledge of these factors is central to improving early detection and refining prevention and early intervention for individuals and to help understand how communities can better manage their response to sever ....Trauma memory and narrative structure in post-traumatic distress. The project enhances understanding of factors that maintain enduring distress and disability following traumatic experiences which have major social and financial costs to individuals, communities and to the nation. Better knowledge of these factors is central to improving early detection and refining prevention and early intervention for individuals and to help understand how communities can better manage their response to severe traumatic events. The results may lead to significant refinements to efficacious psychological treatments involving exposure to emotional memories. The project's innovative approach to studying autobiographical memories will enhance Australia's internationally competitiveness in a key area within psychology.Read moreRead less
Culturally inclusive language assessments for Indigenous Aboriginal students. This project aims to improve the literacy outcomes for Aboriginal students. It focuses on the assessment of oral language, the foundation for written literacy skills, and the mode of communication most common for this student cohort. The project will collect school-based oral language data from rural and remote educational sites and use it to develop supplementary assessment tools for multilingual education. The assess ....Culturally inclusive language assessments for Indigenous Aboriginal students. This project aims to improve the literacy outcomes for Aboriginal students. It focuses on the assessment of oral language, the foundation for written literacy skills, and the mode of communication most common for this student cohort. The project will collect school-based oral language data from rural and remote educational sites and use it to develop supplementary assessment tools for multilingual education. The assessment tools will be validated in workshops with teachers and expanded with descriptors for assessing Aboriginal students’ communicative competence. The project aims to improve educational outcomes for rural and remote Aboriginal students.Read moreRead less
Linguistic analysis of Ngarrindjeri texts. The Ngarrindjeri language of the Lower Murray of South Australia was richly documented in the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The largest body of texts (163 texts in Berndt and Berndt, 1993) is a treasure-trove of language and cultural knowledge from the 1940s, but has received little linguistic attention, because of difficulties in interpreting writing conventions and because of the inadequate translations provided. Through systematic linguisti ....Linguistic analysis of Ngarrindjeri texts. The Ngarrindjeri language of the Lower Murray of South Australia was richly documented in the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The largest body of texts (163 texts in Berndt and Berndt, 1993) is a treasure-trove of language and cultural knowledge from the 1940s, but has received little linguistic attention, because of difficulties in interpreting writing conventions and because of the inadequate translations provided. Through systematic linguistic analysis and reconstructions, this project aims to shed light on how Ngarrindjeri changed over the 100 years since first documentation, how clan languages differed, and how Ngarrindjeri texts and sentences were structured. It is expected to provide important insight into the variation expected in language contact situations.Read moreRead less
Understanding Indonesian: developing a machine-usable grammar, dictionary and corpus. Australia's relationship with Indonesia is of great significance. The need for good relationships founded on appreciation of the range of societies and views in modern Indonesia is widely acknowledged. A better knowledge of the languages is essential for this, and so are fast, efficient information gathering systems for processing multilingual sources (including Indonesian text), that can analyse large volumes ....Understanding Indonesian: developing a machine-usable grammar, dictionary and corpus. Australia's relationship with Indonesia is of great significance. The need for good relationships founded on appreciation of the range of societies and views in modern Indonesia is widely acknowledged. A better knowledge of the languages is essential for this, and so are fast, efficient information gathering systems for processing multilingual sources (including Indonesian text), that can analyse large volumes of text. The skills to build such systems exist internationally. Through collaboration with established international teams, we plan to transfer cutting-edge skills in the development of machine-useable grammars to Australian researchers, and to create the language resources essential for understanding Indonesian.Read moreRead less