ORCID Profile
0000-0002-9551-480X
Current Organisation
Western Sydney University
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Linguistics | Pacific Languages | Linguistic Structures (incl. Grammar, Phonology, Lexicon, Semantics) | Linguistic Processes (incl. Speech Production and Comprehension) |
Languages and Literature | Communication Across Languages and Culture | Expanding Knowledge in Language, Communication and Culture
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 07-07-2020
Publisher: No publisher found
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 30-10-2020
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 23-04-2022
Abstract: We provide evidence that the roughness of chords – a psychoacoustic property resulting from unresolved frequency components – is associated with perceived dissonance (operationalized as stability) in participants with differing levels and types of exposure to Western or Western-like music. Three groups of participants were tested in a remote cloud forest region of Papua New Guinea (PNG), and two groups in Sydney, Australia (musicians and non-musicians). We find a negative relationship between roughness and musical stability in every group including the PNG community with minimal experience of musical harmony. The effect of roughness is stronger for the Sydney participants, particularly musicians. We find an effect of harmonicity – a psychoacoustic property resulting from chords having a spectral structure resembling a single pitched tone (such as produced by human vowel sounds) – only in the Sydney musician group, which indicates this feature’s effect is medi- ated via a culture-dependent mechanism. In sum, these results underline the importance of both universal and cultural mechanisms in music cognition, and they suggest powerful implications for understanding the origin of pitch structures in Western tonal music as well as on possibilities for new musical forms that align with humans’ perceptual and cognitive biases.
Publisher: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Date: 26-05-2021
Abstract: Around the world, more than 7,000 languages are spoken, most of them by small populations of speakers in the tropics. Globalization puts small languages at a disadvantage, but our understanding of the drivers and rate of language loss remains incomplete. When we tested key factors causing language attrition among Papua New Guinean students speaking 392 different indigenous languages, we found an unexpectedly rapid decline in their language skills compared to their parents and predicted further acceleration of language loss in the next generation. Language attrition was accompanied by decline in the traditional knowledge of nature among the students, pointing to an uncertain future for languages and biocultural knowledge in the most linguistically erse place on Earth.
Publisher: Acoustical Society of America (ASA)
Date: 04-2020
DOI: 10.1121/10.0001003
Abstract: This study is a comprehensive acoustic description and analysis of the six vowels /i e a u o ɔ/ in the Towet dialect of the Papuan language Nungon ⟨yuw⟩ of northeastern Papua New Guinea. Vowel tokens were extracted from a corpus of audio speech recordings created for general language documentation and grammatical description. To assess the phonetic correlates of a claimed phonological vowel length distinction, vowel duration was measured. Multi-point acoustic analyses enabled investigation of mean vowel F1, F2, and F3 vowel trajectories, and coarticulation effects. The three Nungon back vowels were of particular interest, as they contribute to an asymmetrical, back vowel-heavy array, and /o/ had previously been described as having an especially low F2. The authors found that duration of phonologically long and short vowels differed significantly. Mean vowel formant measurements confirmed that the six phonological vowels form six distinct acoustic groupings trajectories show slightly more formant movement in some vowels than was previously known. Adjacent nasal consonants exerted significant effects on vowel formant measurements. The authors show that an uncontrolled, general documentation corpus for an under-described language can be mined for acoustic analysis, but coarticulation effects should be taken into account.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 24-07-2021
Abstract: Studies of the acquisition of verbs tend to focus on one-verb predicates of the prevalent English type. But in hundreds of languages around the world, multi-verb predicates like serial verb constructions are widely used. It could be reasoned that children should begin producing simple, single-verb predicates before they are able to produce multi-verb predicates. But alternatively, many multi-verb predicates are idiomatic and could, as chunks, lend themselves to holophrastic acquisition by small children. This article examines early productions of multi-verb predicates in the speech of three children (aged 1 –2 , 2 –3 , and 2 –3 ) acquiring the Papuan language Nungon, comparing patterns there with productions in the child-directed speech of their parents, and with the children’s productions of simple, one-verb predicates. The study’s youngest child never produces multi-verb predicates in the study period, but the child studied for the widest age range produces them from age 2 , when she has still not acquired productive use of all verbal inflections, and both older children show proportionally increasing trends in multi-verb predicate use. Semantically, the earliest multi-verb predicates can be analyzed as describing multidimensional unitary events, with this expanding to events that can be ided into multiple distinct components at later ages. Delays in production of certain other multi-verb predicate types that are robustly present in parental input at all ages cannot be linked to a single factor, but likely relate to a combination of increased phonological or morphological complexity and increased conceptual difficulty.
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 16-09-2021
DOI: 10.1371/JOURNAL.PONE.0257393
Abstract: Adapting laboratory psycholinguistic methods to fieldwork contexts can be fraught with difficulties. However, successful implementation of such methods in the field enhances our ability to learn the true extent and limitations of human behavior. This paper reports two attempts to run word learning experiments with the small community of Nungon speakers in Towet village in the Saruwaged Mountains, Papua New Guinea. A first attempt involved running a cross-situational task in which word-object pairings were presented ambiguously in each trial, and an explicit word learning task in which pairings were presented explicitly, or unambiguously, in each trial. While this quickly garnered a respectable 34 participants over the course of a week, it yielded null results, with many participants appearing to show simple patterned responses at test. We interpreted the null result as possibly reflecting the unfamiliarity of both the task and the laptop-based presentation mode. In Experiment 2, we made several adjustments to the explicit word learning task in an attempt to provide clearer instructions, reduce cognitive load, and frame the study within a real-world context. During a second 11-day stay in the village, 34 participants completed this modified task and demonstrated clear evidence of word learning. With this success serving as a future guide for researchers, our experiences show that it may require multiple attempts, even by experienced fieldworkers familiar with the target community, to successfully adapt experiments to a field setting.
Publisher: Project MUSE
Date: 2013
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 11-08-2021
DOI: 10.3389/FPSYG.2021.667599
Abstract: Music beats spoken language in identifying in iduals uniquely in two disparate communities. In addition to their given names, which conform to the conventions of their languages, speakers of the Oyda (Omotic SW Ethiopia) and Yopno (Finisterre-Huon NE Papua New Guinea) languages have “name tunes,” short 1–4 s melodies that can be sung or whistled to hail or to identify for other purposes. Linguistic given names, for both communities, are often non-unique: people may be named after ancestors or contemporaries, or bear given names common to multiple in iduals. But for both communities, name tunes are generally non-compositional and unique to in iduals. This means that each new generation is likely to bring thousands of new name tunes into existence. In both communities, name tunes are produced in a range of contexts, from quotidian summoning and mid-range communication, to ceremonial occasions. In their use of melodies to directly represent in idual people, the Oyda and Yopno name tune systems differ from surrogate speech systems elsewhere that either: (a) mimic linguistic forms, or (b) use music to represent a relatively small set of messages. Also, unlike some other musical surrogate speech traditions, the Oyda and Yopno name tune systems continue to be used productively, despite societal changes that have led to declining use in some domains.
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 26-10-2015
Abstract: Clause chaining in Papuan languages is a keystone of the literature on switch-reference (Haiman & Munro 1983, Stirling 1993). Canonically, a clause chain is considered to comprise one or more ‘medial’ clauses, followed by a single ‘final’ clause. In Nungon and other Papuan languages, canonical clause chains coexist with non-canonical clause chains, which either feature medial clauses postposed after the final clause, or lack a final clause altogether. I examine the functions of non-canonical medial clauses in Nungon and other Papuan languages in a first attempt at a typology of these uses, given scanty data. Non-canonical medial clauses are argued to represent canny use of the features of clause chains and switch-reference systems to convey meaning efficiently. The exposition also solves an outstanding puzzle of the Amele switch-reference system (Roberts 1988, Stirling 1993).
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Date: 09-08-2014
Abstract: The Finisterre-Huon Papuan language Nungon, like related languages, shows fusion of tense marking with number marking. Nungon is remarkable among Finisterre-Huon languages for an aspectual distinction conflated with evidentiality, and for the development of a formally marked realis Remote Future tense inflection with a formally unmarked irrealis counterpart. This paper presents the entire Nungon verbal inflectional system, including tense, aspect, status, subject and object indexing, referent tracking, and evidentiality.
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 11-12-2019
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 2020
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 12-07-2021
Abstract: Music is a vital part of most cultures and has a strong impact on emotions. In Western cultures, emotive valence (happiness and sadness) is strongly influenced by major and minor melodies and harmony (chords and their progressions). Yet, how pitch and harmony affect our emotions, and to what extent these effects are culturally mediated or universal, is hotly debated. Here, we report an experiment conducted in a remote cloud forest region of Papua New Guinea, across several communities with similar traditional music but differing levels of exposure to Western-influenced tonal music. One hundred and seventy participants were presented with pairs of major and minor cadences (chord progressions) and melodies, and chose which of them made them happier. The experiment was repeated by 60 non-musicians and 19 musicians in Sydney, Australia. Bayesian analyses show that, for cadences, there is strong evidence that major induced greater reported happiness than minor in every community except one: the community with minimal exposure to Western-like music. For melodies, there is strong evidence that those with higher mean pitch (major melodies) induced greater happiness than those with lower mean pitch (minor melodies) in only one of the three PNG communities and in both Sydney groups. The results show that the emotive valence of major and minor is strongly associated with exposure to Western-influenced music and culture, and there is no evidence for universality.
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 22-07-2016
Abstract: Languages that lack grammatical gender often still index the sex of humans and higher animates through lexical means (Braun 2001). In the Papuan language Nungon, natural sex is indicated lexically, with gendered person and kin terms. Certain person terms may also function as nominal modifiers. Indexation of sex in these person and kin terms is partially dependent on age. The older the speaker or focal person for the kin relationship, the more likely that his/her sex will determine the term chosen to refer to the addressee or secondary person in the kin relationship. Most kin and person terms for small children disregard the sex of the child such terms instead employ the sex of the focal person to describe the relationship with the child. Unlike with children, there are no completely gender-neutral terms for adults, although the dedicated male person terms amna , “man” and ketket , “boy” function in certain contexts with generic reference, meaning “human” and “youth.” Generic application of amna , “man” relates to syntax: amna as object argument of deverbal participle expressions has generic reference, as does amna under negation. Thus, indexation of sex is seen to be partially dependent (per Aikhenvald & Dixon 1998) on negation.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 08-2021
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 12-04-2021
DOI: 10.1101/2021.04.12.439439
Abstract: Papua New Guinea is home to % of the world’s languages and rich and varied biocultural knowledge, but the future of this ersity remains unclear. We measured language skills of 6,190 students speaking 392 languages (5.5% of the global total) and modelled their future trends, using in idual-level variables characterizing family language use, socio-economic conditions, student’s skills, and language traits. This approach showed that only 58% of the students, compared to 91% of their parents, were fluent in indigenous languages, while the trends in key drivers of language skills (language use at home, proportion of mixed-language families, urbanization, students’ traditional skills) predicted accelerating decline of fluency, to an estimated 26% in the next generation of students. Ethnobiological knowledge declined in close parallel with language skills. Varied medicinal plant uses known to the students speaking indigenous languages are replaced by a few, mostly non-native species for the students speaking English or Tok Pisin, the national lingua franca. Most (88%) students want to teach indigenous language to their children. While crucial for keeping languages alive, this intention faces powerful external pressures as key factors (education, cash economy, road networks, urbanization) associated with language attrition are valued in contemporary society. Around the world, more than 7,000 languages are spoken, most of them by small populations of speakers in the tropics. Globalization puts small languages at a disadvantage, but our understanding of the drivers and rate of language loss remains incomplete. When we tested key factors causing language attrition among Papua New Guinean students speaking 392 different indigenous languages, we found an unexpectedly rapid decline in their language skills compared to their parents and predicted further acceleration of language loss in the next generation. Language attrition was accompanied by decline in the traditional knowledge of nature among the students, pointing to an uncertain future for languages and biocultural knowledge in the most linguistically erse place on Earth.
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 04-08-2020
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2018
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 04-08-2021
Abstract: This chapter reviews existing research on language acquisition in Papuan languages. It will appear, subject to editing changes, in N. Evans & S. Fedden (eds.), The Oxford Guide to Papuan Languages. We point readers interested further in this topic to the chapter on language socialization in the same volume, by Lila San Roque & Bambi B. Schieffelin.
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 02-02-2018
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 12-2016
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 22-08-2019
DOI: 10.1017/S0305000919000357
Abstract: The ‘root infinitive’ phenomenon in child speech is known from major languages such as Dutch. In this case study, a child acquiring the Papuan language Nungon in a remote village setting in Papua New Guinea uses two different non-finite verb forms as predicates of main clauses (‘root’ contexts) between ages 2 and 3 . The first root non-finite form is an apparent innovation of the child, unacceptable in adult-to-adult speech, which must be learned from a special auxiliary construction in child-directed speech. The second root non-finite form functions like attested adult main clause use of the same form. During the study period, the first root non-finite form increases sharply to function as a default verb form, then decreases to nil by 3 . The second increases gradually to near-adult levels. Both forms are non-finite and have similar proportions in the input. Thus, factors other than finiteness and frequency must explain their distributions.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Date: 09-08-2014
Abstract: The verbal categories of Finisterre-Huon Papuan languages Awara, Ma Manda, Nek, and Nungon are typologically remarkable in several ways. Their tense systems have multiple sub isions within past and future tenses. Tense is fused with number, but the number system varies depending on tense, with the most number values distinguished in the future tenses. Immediate and delayed imperatives are distinguished, with the immediate imperative implying brusqueness and the delayed imperative implying politeness. Aspect is generally encoded analytically, with auxiliary verb constructions, although some languages mark habitual aspect through a verbal suffix. Surprisingly, medial verbs may mark more aspectual distinctions than final verbs. Finally, although grammatical evidentiality is not widely known to exist in Papuan languages of northeastern New Guinea, non-firsthand evidentiality is found to be entwined with verbal aspect marking in both Awara and Nungon. The four Finisterre-Huon (FH) Papuan languages represented in this volume – Awara, Ma Manda, Nek, and Nungon – bring to light many of the unique typological characteristics of this group of under-described languages. The papers presented here offer a sense of the commonalities and differences found in the verbal inflectional systems of FH languages. This introduction provides general background on FH languages, and summarizes some of the points of convergence and ergence among the languages discussed in this volume.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 03-2022
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 21-05-2022
DOI: 10.1075/SL.19058.SAR
Abstract: Clause chains are sequences of clauses with under-specified verbal predicates, plus a single clause with a fully-specified verbal predicate. Clause chains represent the morpho-syntactic demarcation of a speech unit greater than a single clause, but the precise length of this unit is rarely assessed. Clause chain length, distribution, bridging linkage, and non-canonical forms are evaluated in a s le of 64 texts, containing over 1742 clause chains, in the Papuan language Nungon. In the 49 narrative texts, unlike in other genres, total clause chains per text increases as text duration increases. The average clause chain in the s le is 3–4 clauses long the longest has 22 clauses. Average clause chain length decreases as text length increases. The longest narrative texts have similar average clause chain length, proportion of bridging clauses, and proportion of non-canonical clause chains, and feature a leisurely rhythm: half of their clause chains are minimal, two-clause chains.
Location: United States of America
Start Date: 09-2018
End Date: 06-2024
Amount: $392,315.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity