School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableRecognising the SAE language learning needs of Indigenous primary school students who speak contact languages(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2023-01-01)Most Indigenous peoples live in urban and regional locations across Australia and no longer speak their traditional languages fluently. Instead contact languages, creoles and dialects, are widely spoken. In many educational settings, educators may know little about the first languages of the Indigenous children they teach, and not recognise these as different languages or dialects. Consequently, these students may not be treated as second language learners of Standard Australian English (SAE) and their language learning requirements are not considered. From a sociocultural perspective, language is crucial to students’ learning. In this paper, we quantitatively analyse the SAE learning needs of Indigenous primary school aged children in Far North Queensland using oral elicited imitation of simple sentences in SAE as a research method. Using one-way ANOVA, the results are compared with native monolingual SAE speakers showing significant differences between the two. This finding has important implications for classroom teaching practices and educational policies.
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ItemInterdisciplinary and Intercultural Development of an Early Literacy App in Dhuwaya(MDPI, 2021-06)Phonological awareness is a skill which is crucial in learning to read. In this paper, we report on the challenges encountered while developing a digital application (app) for teaching phonological awareness and early literacy skills in Dhuwaya. Dhuwaya is a Yolŋu language variety spoken in Yirrkala and surrounding areas in East Arnhem Land. Dhuwaya is the first language of the children who attend a bilingual school in which Dhuwaya and English are the languages of instruction. Dhuwaya and English have different phonemic inventories and different alphabets. The Dhuwaya alphabet is based on Roman alphabet symbols and has 31 graphemes (compared to 26 in English). The app was designed to teach children how to segment and blend syllables and phonemes and to identify common words as well as suffixes used in the language. However, the development was not straightforward, and the impact of the linguistic, cultural and educational challenges could not have been predicted. Amongst these was the inherent variation in the language, including glottal stops, the pronunciation of stops, the focus on syllables as a decoding strategy for literacy development and challenges of finding one-syllable words such as those initially used with English-speaking children. Another challenge was identifying culturally appropriate images which the children could relate to and which were not copyrighted. In this paper, we discuss these plus a range of other issues that emerged, identifying how these problems were addressed and resolved by the interdisciplinary and intercultural team.
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ItemThe “other” Spanish: Methodological issues in the study of speech timing in Chilean Spanish(International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), 2020-01-01)This paper is a preliminary account of speech rhythm and some phonological properties of Chilean Spanish in spontaneous dialogues. Different dialects of Spanish have been studied using rhythm metrics measuring the durational variability of vocalic and consonantal intervals. There are, however, methodological issues regarding the segmentation of intervals, often overlooked in previous research, such as the criteria for categorising certain segments into the different intervals and the segmentation of different voice qualities. The present study addresses this gap and compares rhythm metrics obtained using two methods of segmentation based on the available literature. The analyses reveal that a strictly 'acoustic' approach to segmentation of intervals results in slightly inflated metrics. Nevertheless, both methods show there is significant durational interval variability in Chilean Spanish, compared to other dialects of Spanish, that may be connected to phonological properties of the variety.
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ItemDichotic listening is associated with phonological awareness in Australian aboriginal children with otitis media: A remote community-based study(Elsevier, 2020-11-01)Recent literature has highlighted a link between hearing loss as a result of otitis media in the early years of life and impacted binaural processing skills in later childhood. Such findings are of particular relevance to Indigenous Australian children, who tend to experience otitis media earlier in life and for longer periods than their non-Indigenous counterparts. There is also growing interest in the effects of reduced auditory processing ability on a child's early learning of language and, specifically, on phonological awareness that contributes to word reading skills. The aim of the present study was to determine the association between hearing thresholds, dichotic listening skills and phonological awareness in children with pervasive otitis media (OM) from remote Indigenous communities of Australia who generally do not speak English as a first language. Methods: Participants included one hundred and one children between the ages of 4.8–7.9 years (mean 6.1 years) from three separate remote Northern Territory communities. Evaluations included otoscopy, air conduction PTA, and tympanometry. All children were also assessed on the Dichotic Digits difference test (DDdT) and the Foundations of Early Literacy Assessment (FELA), assessing children's dichotic listening and phonological awareness respectively. Results: The results showed that 56% of the children had middle ear dysfunctions (type B and type C on tympanometry results) in at least one ear on the day. Partial correlation showed a significant correlation, between dichotic scores and FELA with age as covariate (r = 0.45, p < 0.001). One way ANOVA showed females exhibited a significantly higher performance compared to males on FELA [F (1, 99) = 5.47, p = 0.021]. The overall regression model was found to be significant in predicting total FELA scores [F (7, 77) = 7.56, p < 0.0005]. Age and gender as well as dichotic listening scores explain 40.7% of the variance. Conclusions: The results reinforce the importance of managing the ear health of Indigenous children, clarifying the impact this has on listening and phonological awareness. These findings highlight the importance of evaluating children's listening abilities, and how poor listening can impact phonological awareness. The findings have important implications for ensuring optimal listening and learning conditions in schools in remote NT communities.
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ItemFundamental Frequency and Regional Variation in Lifou French(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2022-12)This study presents two experiments aimed at investigating tune-to-text alignment and pitch scaling in Lifou French, a variety spoken by bilingual speakers of French and Drehu. Descriptions of New Caledonian French have focussed on language use of European descendants or the variety spoken in the urban region, neglecting emergent varieties spoken by the indigenous population in rural areas, like the island Lifou. Due to the reduced inventory of pitch accents, dialectal variation in French intonation has proved to be difficult to detect, which has led to the assumption that French has a relatively homogeneous intonation system across its varieties. This study shows that fine-grained phonetic differences in speaking tempo and at the level of tonal alignment as well as in the scaling of AP-final peaks can be attributed to dialectal variation.
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ItemRelationships between Comprehension, Strategic Behaviours and Content-Related Aspects of Test Performances in Integrated Speaking Tasks(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2021-03-15)The use of integrated tasks to test English speaking skills raises questions about the impact of comprehension on test score outcomes, and the impact of stimulus materials on test taker strategic behaviours. This study analysed speaking performances and verbal report data to examine the strategies used by test takers at different levels of proficiency to relate stimulus text information in response to a TOEFL-iBT reading-listening-speaking task. 120 speaking performances were analysed to identify how ideas from reading and listening source texts were reproduced, summarised and/or synthesised. Verbal reports from 38 test takers were also collected. Findings showed that test takers, regardless of proficiency, reproduced more single ideas from stimulus texts than summarised or synthesised information, although high proficiency test takers summarised information more than low proficiency test takers. Verbal report data further revealed that high proficiency test takers engage in effective summarisation and synthesising as part of note-taking while reading and listening, suggesting these are aspects of integrated speaking task constructs and supporting the relevance of integrated tasks for assessing entry to tertiary educational domains.
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ItemProbability of Heritage Language Use at a Supportive Early Childhood Setting in Australia(FRONTIERS MEDIA SA, 2020-07-16)Despite well-established research that documents the intellectual, linguistic, sociocultural and familiar benefits of early childhood bilingualism, Australia's provision of heritage language (HL) support in early childhood (EC) settings is fairly minimal, resulting in little to no access to the HL outside of the home. We report on language data from a long day care preschool that has an open bilingual policy, where two languages (HL and English) are used in naturalistic interactions between children and educators. While the quantity of language input and output is known to impact on language proficiency, there are no prior studies which focus on establishing the quantitative nature of naturalistic language production in a bilingual preschool. Our goal was to document the relative language input and output of HL and English and to examine whether there are differences across age groups in the EC setting, and during different activity types. We followed a quantitative approach in data analysis, with child and educator observations over a period of 8 weeks and an analysis of targeted videos amounting to close to an hour of recordings per child. We used Bayesian modeling to test the probability of HL use in the different age groups and per activity type. Overall, HL input was higher for toddlers than preschoolers and toddlers received more HL input than English, while preschoolers received comparable input in both languages. The higher probability of HL input in toddlers was particularly evident during story time and playing activities. Our results indicate a high level of HL use in this EC setting, suggesting success in HL maintenance and promotion of early bilingualism. Further research should explore the children's relative language output in relation to their input, individual differences, as well as extending the current methodology to other similar settings in Australia.
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ItemPhrasing and constituent boundaries in Lifou French(Australasian Speech Science and Technology Australia (ASSTA), 2019)
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ItemSecond language fluency: re-thinking utterance fluency from a phonetics-phonology interface(Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc., 2019-08-09)Research into second language fluency has called for cross-linguistic studies to rule out measures that can be attributed to intra-speaker variation. However, cross-linguistic comparisons in fluency studies are problematic. Research in the area has not necessarily taken into consideration differences across languages such as syllable structure, phonotactics, durational cues to prominence and prosodic levels, and idiosyncratic nature of pause duration. The preliminary results of this study into L2 fluency in Chilean Spanish speakers of English revealed that speed and pause phenomena were mostly idiosyncratic, and that segments rather than syllables could be a more reliable measure. Durational cues for phrasal level prominence were not implemented consistently in the L1 and preboundary lengthening in the L2 was not necessarily being used to signal prosodic constituent boundaries. It may be useful to re-operationalize measures used in L2 fluency studies from a phonetics-phonology interface perspective
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ItemLinguistic diversity in first language acquisition research: moving beyond the challenges(SAGE Publications (UK and US), 2015)The field of first language acquisition (FLA) needs to take into account data from the broadest typological array of languages and language-learning environments if it is to identify potential universals in child language development, and how these interact with socio-cultural mechanisms of acquisition. Yet undertaking FLA research in remote field-based situations, where the majority of the world’s languages are spoken and acquired, poses challenges for best-practice methodologies assumed in lab-based FLA research. This article discusses the challenges of child language acquisition research in fieldwork contexts with lesser-known, under-described languages with small communities of speakers. The authors suggest some modified approaches to methodology for child language research appropriate to challenging fieldwork situations, in the hope of encouraging more cross-linguistic acquisition research.