School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

Permanent URI for this collection

http://hdl.handle.net/11343/392

Filters

2020 - 2023 2
2
Reset filters

Settings
Statistics
Citations
Author: Baker, Brett × Author: Bundgaard-Nielsen, Rikke × Start date: 2020 ×

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Item
    No Preview Available
    Stop contrast acquisition in child Kriol: Evidence of stable transmission of phonology post Creole formation.
    Bundgaard-Nielsen, RL ; Baker, BJ ; Bell, EA ; Wang, Y (Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2023-07-26)
    Many Aboriginal Australian communities are undergoing language shift from traditional Indigenous languages to contact varieties such as Kriol, an English-lexified Creole. Kriol is reportedly characterised by lexical items with highly variable phonological specifications, and variable implementation of voicing and manner contrasts in obstruents (Sandefur, 1986). A language, such as Kriol, characterised by this unusual degree of variability presents Kriol-acquiring children with a potentially difficult language-learning task, and one which challenges the prevalent theories of acquisition. To examine stop consonant acquisition in this unusual language environment, we present a study of Kriol stop and affricate production, followed by a mispronunciation detection study, with Kriol-speaking children (ages 4-7) from a Northern Territory community where Kriol is the lingua franca. In contrast to previous claims, the results suggest that Kriol-speaking children acquire a stable phonology and lexemes with canonical phonemic specifications, and that English experience would not appear to induce this stability.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Pause acceptability indicates word-internal structure in Wubuy
    Bundgaard-Nielsen, RL ; Baker, BJ (Elsevier BV, 2020-05)
    Words in polysynthetic languages, such as the Australian language Wubuy, can be semantically complex and translate into whole phrases in analytic languages such as English. This raises questions about whether such words are like words in English, or whether they are more like phrases. In the following, we examine Wubuy speakers' knowledge of word-internal morphological complexity in a word-preference task, in which we test the acceptability of complex words into which artificial pauses have been embedded at a range of morphological junctures. The results show that participants prefer unmodified words and words with pauses inserted at semantically transparent morphological junctures over words with pauses at other junctures. There is no preference for unmodified words over words with pauses at transparent junctures. These results suggest that speakers have access to some word-internal morphological information, and that complex words may share characteristics of both words and phrases in, for instance, English.