ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 29 April 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00514
Child-caregiver interaction in two
remote Indigenous Australian
communities
Jill Vaughan 1 , Gillian Wigglesworth 1*, Deborah Loakes 1 , Samantha Disbray 2 and
Karin Moses 3
1
School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia, 2 Northern Institute, Charles Darwin
University, Alice Springs, NT, Australia, 3 Student Learning, La Trobe University, Bendigo, VIC, Australia
Edited by:
Carmel O’Shannessy,
University of Michigan, USA
Reviewed by:
Jennifer Smith,
University of Glasgow, UK
Ian Grenville Malcolm,
Edith Cowan University,
Australia (retired)
*Correspondence:
Gillian Wigglesworth,
School of Languages and Linguistics,
University of Melbourne, Darling
Street, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia
gillianw@unimelb.edu.au
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 07 August 2014
Accepted: 11 April 2015
Published: 29 April 2015
Citation:
Vaughan J, Wigglesworth G, Loakes
D, Disbray S and Moses K (2015)
Child-caregiver interaction in two
remote Indigenous Australian
communities. Front. Psychol. 6:514.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00514
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
This paper reports on a study in two remote multilingual Indigenous Australian
communities: Yakanarra in the Kimberley region of Western Australia and Tennant Creek
in the Barkly region of the Northern Territory. In both communities, processes of language
shift are underway from a traditional language (Walmajarri and Warumungu, respectively)
to a local creole variety (Fitzroy Valley Kriol and Wumpurrarni English, respectively). The
study focuses on language input from primary caregivers to a group of preschool children,
and on the children’s productive language. The study further highlights child-caregiver
interactions as a site of importance in understanding the broader processes of language
shift. We use longitudinal data from two time-points, approximately 2 years apart, to
explore changes in adult input over time and developmental patterns in the children’s
speech. At both time points, the local creole varieties are the preferred codes of
communication for the dyads in this study, although there is some use of the traditional
language in both communities. Results show that for measures of turn length (MLT),
there are notable differences between the two communities for both the focus children
and their caregivers. In Tennant Creek, children and caregivers use longer turns at
Time 2, while in Yakanarra the picture is more variable. The two communities also
show differing trends in terms of conversational load (MLT ratio). For measures of
morphosyntactic complexity (MLU), children and caregivers in Tennant Creek use more
complex utterances at Time 2, while caregivers in Yakanarra show less complexity in their
language at that time point. The study’s findings contribute to providing a more detailed
picture of the multilingual practices at Yakanarra and Tennant Creek, with implications for
understanding broader processes of language shift. They also elucidate how children’s
language and linguistic input varies diachronically across time. As such, we contribute to
understandings of normative language development for non-Western, non middle-class
children in multilingual contexts.
Keywords: child language acquisition, language input, language shift, Walmajarri, Fitzroy Valley Kriol, Warumungu,
Wumpurrarni English
Introduction
Indigenous children in Australia grow up in a range of diverse language settings. In the cities and
metropolitan areas, particularly along the populated coastlines of Australia, which were settled early
1
April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 514
Vaughan et al.
Child-caregiver interaction in Indigenous Australia
Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition (ACLA1) study3 , carried
out from 2004 to 2007, which focused on child-directed speech,
as well as language use by children, in three Indigenous Australian communities (for more information on ACLA1 see Wigglesworth and Simpson, 2008)—Yakanarra, Tennant Creek and
Kalkaringi4 . This is particularly interesting because of the relative dearth of information on how non-Western children acquire
language, and also because these particular children live in multilingual societies which are undergoing rapid language shift. We
address prior research in this area further below.
by Europeans, traditional languages have long ceased to be spoken as the primary means of day-to-day communication. Instead,
local varieties of Aboriginal English are spoken as in-community
and in-family codes. “Aboriginal English” is an umbrella term,
covering a range of varieties in different sociolinguistic and geographic settings (see Malcolm and Kaldor, 1991). Aboriginal
English is largely mutually intelligible with standard Australian
English, and in its “lightest” styles differs only in minor ways from
the standard, usually in pronunciation, lexis, grammatical patterns, speech pragmatics and conceptualization (see e.g., Kaldor
and Malcolm, 1982; Malcolm and Kaldor, 1991; Eades, 1996; Malcolm and Sharifian, 2002, 2007; McGregor, 2004; Sharifian, 2005;
Butcher, 2008).
In more remote locations, particularly in central and northern
Australia, the picture is more complex. In some places, traditional
languages continue to be acquired as first languages by the current generation of children, and in other places, language shift
to contact varieties, including mixed languages and local creole
varieties, has taken place, or is in process (see e.g., McConvell
and Thieberger, 2001). Creole varieties on mainland Australia
are referred to as Kriol, the name being based on the word creole1 . There are a number of locally named varieties of Kriol, for
example in Yakanarra (one of our field sites), the variety is called
Fitzroy Valley Kriol (or Kimberley Kriol) (see e.g., Hudson, 1985),
henceforth FVKriol. Another example is Roper River Kriol spoken in the Ngukurr region. In Tennant Creek (our second field
site) the creole is referred to as Wumpurrarni English, henceforth
WE, and varies from acrolectal (more like English) to basilectal
(a heavy creole) (see e.g., Disbray and Simpson, 2004; Disbray,
2009)2 .
Recent research into such language settings in Australia is providing descriptions of children’s language acquisition in diverse
and dynamic contexts (see, for example, the variety of papers in
Simpson and Wigglesworth, 2008). Other research focuses on the
rapidly changing language environments and the emergence of
new contact varieties (e.g., Bavin and Shopen, 1985 for Yuendumu Warlpiri; McConvell and Meakins, 2005; Meakins, 2011
for Gurindji Kriol; O’Shannessy, 2005 for Light Warlpiri and
McConvell, 2008 for general discussion of mixed languages in
Indigenous Australia).
This study is an investigation of language use amongst Indigenous caregivers and their young children in two remote communities in Australia. There are two themes to the paper. The first
regards child language development, and the second compares
how this manifests in two communities of Indigenous people that
are in many ways comparable (remote, multiple codes spoken,
community language endangerment, and shift) but are markedly
different in terms of the sociolinguistic setting and the mixture of
languages that children are exposed to.
Our own work has looked in some detail at the language situation in Indigenous Australia. The work is associated with The
Studies of Child-Directed Speech
We have looked, for example, at the way Yakanarra children deal
with questions in an informal setting (Moses and Yallop, 2008),
at the language codes children receive from different aged interlocutors (Loakes et al., 2013), and children’s knowledge of their
traditional language (Loakes et al., 2012). From this, we know that
Indigenous children in Yakanarra frequently experience questions and respond to questioning, debunking earlier views that
Indigenous Australians are not familiar with question-answer
routines (Moses and Yallop, 2008). We know that children speak
and hear FVKriol predominantly, but are also exposed to the
traditional language Walmajarri, especially from older community members. As far as Walmajarri is concerned, we also know
that children have relatively good receptive knowledge when it
comes to nouns (Loakes et al., 2012), and we also know that
their traditional language knowledge goes beyond this, because
they may respond to Walmajarri utterances from an elder entirely
(and appropriately) in FVKriol (examples shown in Loakes et al.,
2013).
In Tennant Creek we have investigated interactions between
caregivers and children during joint picture-book viewing (Disbray, 2008). In these interactions we saw that caregivers of
the children aged between 18 months and 5 years of age were
sensitive to the child’s level of attention at different ages, and
that through questioning and prompting, and through repetition and elaboration, they collaboratively “built” a rich narrative.
This study also established common patterns of use of Warumungu features in WE, further explored as a factor of the age of
the adult speaker in Morrison and Disbray (2008). These studies have shown that children hear full Warumungu only from
elderly speakers, and that in the WE speech of younger adults,
some common Warumungu nouns and fewer Warumungu verbs
are used, a bilingual speech pattern which children also later
develop (Disbray, 2009). Additionally, semantic case-markers,
derived from Warumungu, have been incorporated into WE, and
are used variably (Disbray and Simpson, 2004; Morrison and
Disbray, 2008).
We know that, in general, children have acquired most of
the skills needed for adult-like language proficiency by the time
they attend primary school (Hoff, 2001), and spend their school
years mastering more complex grammatical and phonological
features. However, studies of the development of grammaticality in Indigenous Australian children have only recently gained
1 In the Torres Strait Islands off Northern Queensland, the creole variety spoken is
referred to as “Torres Strait Creole.” The spelling Kriol stems from the orthography
developed for Roper River Kriol (Sandefur, 1979).
2 See Harris (1993) for a discussion of the development of Kriol in Australia, and
more information about the varieties spoken.
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
3
4
2
http://languages-linguistics.unimelb.edu.au/past-projects/acla1
See Moses (2009), Disbray (2009), and Meakins (2011) respectively.
April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 514
Vaughan et al.
Child-caregiver interaction in Indigenous Australia
the production of multiclause utterances by 4-year olds in relation to parental input at home, and teacher input at pre-school,
and found that the style of parental input was the major predictor
of syntactic complexity in children’s speech. In addition, various
studies have shown the complexity, quantity, and lexical diversity of caregiver speech to have strong correlations with children’s
vocabulary development (Huttenlocher et al., 1991; Hart and
Risley, 1995; Bornstein et al., 1998; Naigles and Hoff-Ginsberg,
1998; Hoff and Naigles, 2002; Hoff, 2003; Pan et al., 2005; Rowe,
2008).
Recent studies of the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation (e.g., Foulkes et al., 1999, 2005; Díaz-Campos, 2005; Smith
et al., 2007, 2013; O’Shannessy, 2011) emphasize that childdirected speech plays a central role in socializing children into
the appropriate use and the social-indexical values of variables
(Foulkes et al., 2005, p. 177). For example, in their study of 29
child/caregiver pairs in a small Scottish fishing village, Smith et al.
showed that patterns of variation are acquired at a very early age
in tandem with language acquisition more generally, but that the
nature of this process may vary according to the variable in question (2013, p. 321). Foulkes et al. (2005), in their study of childdirected speech among 39 mothers in North East England, found
that phonetic variants used in this register differed markedly from
inter-adult speech, and further noted effects with regard to the
gender of the children in the dyads: speech to girls contained
more standard variants than speech to boys, which contained
higher rates of vernacular variants. This effect was more apparent
for younger children in the sample.
momentum. Malcolm (1996) reports on development of the
verb phrase in Aboriginal English spoken in a remote Indigenous region, and concludes that there is evidence that language
development may be ongoing for bilingual/bidialectal Indigenous children even between 5 and 10 years of age. Disbray (2009)
investigated the development of discourse competence among
5–14 year old WE-speaking children, demonstrating that the
children pass through similar developmental stages to children
speaking other languages to create a cohesive text. A great deal of
further research is needed to understand language development
amongst Indigenous Australian children.
Previous studies of child-directed speech have noted that
parental speech to children can involve utterances that are
shorter, morphosyntactically simpler, and more redundant than
speech directed at adults (e.g., Snow, 1972, 1977; Sachs et al.,
1976; Ferguson, 1977). These findings contributed to the idea that
simplified language input may help children’s language development (e.g., Snow, 1972), often referred to as the “motherese
hypothesis.” In the 2–5 year old age range, as in the present
study, language development is characterized by a move from
simple two- and three-word combinations to the production of
more grammatically sophisticated utterances, as children become
skilled at using most of the requisite grammatical morphemes
and begin to construct complex multiclause sentences (Hoff,
2001; Berko Gleason, 2005).
Snow (1972) observed that maternal speech to 2-year olds
is simpler and more redundant than speech directed at 10year-olds, and other studies focusing on younger children in
the fundamental stages of language acquisition have demonstrated that caregivers make fine adjustments to the complexity
of their speech according to the age of the child (e.g., Vosoughi,
2010). Kaye (1980), Philips (1973) and Rondal (1980) all observed
markedly shorter, simpler, and more repetitive utterances to
infants than to toddler-aged children. A more recent study by
Huttenlocher et al. (2007) with children aged 14–30 months reinforces these early findings; their analysis of the speech used by
English-speaking parents with their children at 4-month intervals
revealed that caregivers made substantial adjustments to the syntactic complexity and diversity of their speech over the 16-month
time period. In the sample of 50 parents, Huttenlocher et al. also
found individual differences in input patterns related to caregiver education level, and noted that caregivers maintained their
idiosyncratic input patterns at the same time as making incremental adjustments to their speech depending on the age of their
child interlocutor. The researchers suggest that this consistent
adjustment indicates caregiver sensitivity to the language levels of
young children, while providing the children with a progressively
broader set of language models.
Other studies incorporating child production data have
demonstrated that longer and more complex utterances from
caregivers correlate with more advanced morphosyntactic development in children. Hoff-Ginsberg (1998), in a study of maternal
speech to children based on birth order, found that first-born
children showed “more precocious lexical and grammatical
development than later borns” (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998, p. 626),
and that this correlated with longer and more complex utterances from their mothers. Huttenlocher et al. (2002) looked at
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
Studies of Cross-Cultural Language Input
Cross-culturally, children have different early language experiences, and the existing research on non-Western cultural groups
indicates that there is a great deal of variation in the type and
amount of direct language input children receive in the preschool years (Hoff, 2006). Various studies have observed that in
some non-Western cultures, young children are not seen as communicative partners, and receive very little child-directed speech
as infants, in contrast to the patterns observed for North American and European caregivers. This been noted for Gusii mothers
in Kenya (Richman et al., 1992; LeVine, 2004), Gapuners in Papua
New Guinea (Kulick, 1992), the Kaluli in Papua New Guinea
(Ochs and Schieffelin, 1994), Samoans in Western Samoa (Ochs
and Schieffelin, 1994), the Warlpiri of central Australia (Bavin,
1992), K’iche’ Maya speakers in Guatemala (Pye, 1992), Tzeltal
speakers in Mexico (Brown, 2001), Javanese speakers in East Java
(Smith-Hefner, 1998), and African-Americans in South Carolina
(Heath, 1983). In many of these studies (e.g., Ochs and Schieffelin, 1994), the researchers suggest that a large amount of early
language learning must be based on overheard, rather than childdirected, language, and that minimal direct speech to children
may correlate with relatively late language development (Brown,
2001).
However, there is very little research describing language input
in these non-Western societies on occasions when input is provided by caregivers, and even less looking at child language development in relation to input, beyond the body of research on the
acquisition of language-specific grammatical and phonological
3
April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 514
Vaughan et al.
Child-caregiver interaction in Indigenous Australia
found that less traditional language is found in children’s interactions with younger interlocutors. These young interlocutors also
use markedly more talk than older interactants.
While there is some research into normative language development for non middle-class, non-Western children, this area
remains poorly understood, particularly in situations where the
children grow up in multilingual communities. Research suggests that bi- or multilingual children progress through linguistic developmental stages at similar rates to monolingual
children (Pearson et al., 1993; Paradis and Genesee, 1996; De
Houwer, 2005), and in particular that when all the child’s linguistic resources are considered (i.e., their knowledge of both/all
languages), multilingual children have similar vocabulary sizes
and grammatical abilities to monolingual children (Pearson and
Fernandez, 1994; Nicoladis and Genesee, 1997; Patterson, 1998;
Patterson and Pearson, 2004). However, in assessing children’s
abilities in each separate language, some research suggests that
at comparable ages, bi- or multilingual children may have less
developed vocabularies and grammatical abilities in each individual language than monolingual children in their sole language
(Bialystok and Feng, 2011; Hoff et al., 2012). Other research indicates that language development progresses language-specifically
(Marchman et al., 2004; Conboy and Thal, 2006). Language
development for multilingual children is also clearly tied in with
the issue of language dominance, which in turn is closely related
to the type and quantity of language input children receive
from carers (Lanza, 1997; De Houwer, 1999, 2007; Hoff et al.,
2012). As for other areas of acquisition research, knowledge
about language socialization in multilingual families tends to
be based on research in Western cultures. Some research has
investigated language socialization in language contact settings
(Garrett and Baquedano-López, 2002; Luykx, 2005; Makihara,
2005; Gafaranga, 2010; O’Shannessy, 2011) including creole contexts (Garrett, 2005; Paugh, 2005), and it is clear that these
non-Western contexts encompass an extremely diverse range of
language learning environments, with many unique and contextspecific factors that need to be considered in investigations of
child language development.
We cannot assume that current understandings of child language input and language development hold true for children
in linguistically diverse non-Western settings, and there is still
a large amount of research to be done on the nature of the language received and produced by children in these settings, as
well as the language development patterns that are normal for
them. As Saxton (2009, 2010) points out, many non-Western language socialization studies are anthropological in nature, rather
than designed specifically to investigate child language input and
acquisition, particularly those cited as evidence of minimal or
non-modified child directed speech.
There is evidently a need for targeted exploration of caregiver
input behavior and child language production cross-culturally
and cross-linguistically, and the present study contributes to this
by providing input and production data for two Indigenous Australian communities: Yakanarra in the Kimberley area of Western Australia, and Tennant Creek in the Barkly region of the
Northern Territory. The study focuses on language input by primary caregivers to a group of preschool children, and also focuses
features. In Indigenous Australia, a number of researchers have
observed the use of “baby talk” registers (Laughren, 1984; Lee,
1987; Bavin, 1992, 1993; Kral and Ellis, 2008; Jones and Meakins,
2013; Turpin et al., 2014). This register is typically characterized
by such features as phonological simplification, semantic simplification (for some groups of vocabulary items), repetition, slower
speech rate and falling prosodic contour.
Outside the Australian context, Harkness’ (1977) crosssectional study found that Kipsigis caregivers in Kenya modified the length and complexity of their utterances as a function
of their child interlocutor’s MLU, adjusting their speech to the
developmental stage of the child, leading Harkness to observe
that “mothers and children in cultures far removed from our
own modify their speech to children learning to talk in the same
way that Americans do” (1977: 315). In contrast, there are claims
that when caregivers in some other cultures talk to children, they
do not use “baby talk”; for example, Ochs and Schieffelin (1994)
observe that Kaluli and Samoan caregivers, though they may use
pitch manipulation, do not engage in the morphosyntactic simplification synonymous with child-directed speech. Despite this,
“Kaluli and Samoan children become fluent speakers within the
range of normal developmental variation” (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1994, p. 494). Crago et al. (1997) have similarly found that
of the minimal language input received by children in Inuktitutspeaking communities in Quebec, very little is morphosyntactically modified, but the children still achieve the major language
development milestones at ages comparable to those for Western children. In reviewing the literature on child-directed speech,
Lieven (1994) argues that the child-centered style of speaking
may be one way of enabling children to learn and use their
mother tongue, “but it is clearly not essential” (1994: 72), and
concludes that children worldwide tend to learn language at
around the same time, despite the diverse ways of speaking to
(and around) children.
A further important aspect of the linguistic socialization of
Indigenous children in Australia pertains to the high level of
input children receive from interactants other than adults. In
many Indigenous communities, children spend a great deal of
their time playing and interacting with other children, with
older children often taking on caregiving roles. Hamilton’s (1981)
observations in Arnhem Land describe how from the age of two,
children are absorbed into a peer group of related children for
support and learning experiences. These groups may develop into
more structured “kid mobs” common for children from 5 to 9
years of age, resulting in less frequent interaction with adults.
After-school and weekend activities may take place in kid mob
groupings, which are largely determined by common linguistic
and kinship ties. The linguistic consequences may be significant,
with the “kid mob” a potentially dominant force in community language shift whereby younger speakers may even socialize
adults in language choice (see Luykx, 2005 and Gafaranga, 2010).
O’Shannessy (2012, 2013) has shown that children can play a significant role in language change, partly due to their spending
time in peer groups, and partly due to the kind of input they
receive. Loakes et al. (2013) addressed this aspect of community
language shift in Yakanarra by investigating the input received
from different-aged interlocutors with regard to code choice and
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
4
April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 514
Vaughan et al.
Child-caregiver interaction in Indigenous Australia
Aims
on the children’s productive language. We use longitudinal data
from two time-points, approximately 2 years apart, to describe
changes in adult input over time and developmental patterns in
the children’s speech.
As discussed earlier, our previous work in both Yakanarra and
Tennant Creek has shown that language shift is occurring rapidly,
and children hear a variety of different input codes, with FVKriol
in Yakanarra and Wumpurrani English in Tennant Creek being
the main codes used. The input they hear varies along a continuum from more acrolectal to more basilectal determined by various factors including the person, the setting and the interlocutor.
This study therefore examines both features of input to the children, and features of the production of the children at two points
in time 2 years apart, when the children were approximately two
and four.
The specific research questions we address are:
Profiles of the Communities
Both communities in this study are located in remote desert
regions of Australia. Yakanarra is in the far north of the state of
Western Australia, and Tennant Creek is centrally located in the
Northern Territory.
Yakanarra
Yakanarra consists of about 30 houses 110 km south-east of
Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberley region. Yakanarra is typical of a remote rural Indigenous community in Australia, with
the majority of residents being Indigenous, and the few nonIndigenous residents working in the school, community center,
or shop. Yakanarra was established in 1989 by Walmajarri people, the oldest of whom had left their traditional country and
hunter-gatherer way of life in the 1950s.
The traditional language of Yakanarra is Walmajarri, but by
2006, when Moses was carrying out fieldwork, FVKriol had displaced Walmajarri as the language of everyday talk, although
Walmajarri was still spoken to some degree by the older members of the community (see especially Loakes et al., 2013). Some
Standard Australian English is spoken in limited circumstances,
typically in formal contexts, and with non-Indigenous people (see
e.g., Wigglesworth and Simpson, 2008, p. 20).
(1) What are the characteristics of the children’s language use at
ages two and four in terms of MLT and MLU?
(2) What are the characteristics of the caregivers’ language use at
the two time points in terms of MLT and MLU?
(3) In these two communities, what kinds of multilingual practices can be observed in the children’s and the caregivers’
language use?
While analysis of Time 1 compared to Time 2 is sometimes considered a gross measure of development (c.f. Snow, 1995), we
argue that it is a crucial first step to understanding longitudinal
changes in child language in these communities. Given the lack of
understanding about normative language development in Indigenous Australian communities generally, and particularly in areas
undergoing rapid language shift, we hope that results of the current study will be used as a reference sample for other researchers
working in this area.
In general, ongoing work in Indigenous Australian communities is largely a response to the fact that language acquisition in
monolingual (especially English-speaking) communities is wellunderstood, yet language acquisition in multilingual Indigenous
societies such as those in Australia is understudied (see for example the discussion in Wigglesworth and Simpson, 2008, p. 14).
Additionally, it is a response to the need for basic, languagespecific work on developmental patterns before a full theory of
child language acquisition can be attained (see e.g., Slobin, 1997).
Tennant Creek
Tennant Creek is a remote, urban township in the Barkly region
of Central Australia. It is a small town with a population of
approximately 3000, half of whom are Indigenous. The township is located on Warumungu country, the traditional language
of the area. The local Kriol variety, Wumpurrarni English (see
Disbray, 2009), is the main language of everyday communication
for most Warumungu people. This local variety shares features
with other Kriol varieties spoken in Indigenous Australia, but has
a number of local features, including the use of Warumungusource features, such as insertional code-switches and semantic
case-marking (Morrison and Disbray, 2008).
Like many contact settings, there is substantial variation
in the way people in Tennant Creek use the contact variety
Wumpurrarni English, with the speech varieties best understood
as occupying a continuum from “lighter” or more acrolectal
to “heavier” or more basilectal styles. Similarly to the situation
in Yakanarra, Warumungu has undergone significant language
shift, and is spoken as a full code only by a small number of
elders, with younger adult speakers tending to be partial speakers
(Morrison and Disbray, 2008).
Method
Participants
For both communities there are four child participants in the
study, as well as their main caregiver, who were their mothers in
all cases but one—BM is Belinda’s great-grandmother5 . This gives
four interactional pairs and eight participants in each community, with sixteen participants in total. Information about the participants is shown in Table 1 below. This includes pseudonyms
which refer to the children, their sex, the code for their caregiver,
the children’s ages at Time 1 and 2, and the age difference across
the time-points. The caregiver code corresponds to the first initial of the child and the initial “M” for mother, so for example the
mother of the first child in the table, Natalie, is referred to as NM.
Comparing Yakanarra and Tennant Creek
Yakanarra and Tennant Creek are both located in desert regions
of Australia. Yakanarra is a remote and relatively closed community with little outside influence, while Tennant Creek is a larger
town on a major highway, with a greater variety of people from
varied language backgrounds.
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
5
5
It is not unusual to have a great grandmother in an Indigenous community.
April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 514
Vaughan et al.
Child-caregiver interaction in Indigenous Australia
TABLE 1 | Participant details.
Community
Child
Sex
Caregiver
Child age time 1
Tennant creek
Natalie
F
NM
2;7
4;7
2;0
Tennant creek
Melanie
F
MM
2;7
4;3
1;8
Tennant creek
Sarah
F
SM
1;8
3;7
1;11
Tennant creek
Belinda
F
BM
2;2
4;2
2;0
Yakanarra
Katherine
F
KM
3;6
5;6
2;0
Yakanarra
Olivia
F
OM
2;7
4;7
2;0
Yakanarra
Andrew
M
AM
2;2
4;7
2;5
Yakanarra
Emily
F
EM
2;6
4;6
2;0
Procedure
The corpus for this study comprises sixteen transcripts transcribed into CLAN6 . Transcripts were based on video and audiorecorded interactions between the eight focus children and their
primary caregivers, at the two different time periods. All transcripts are of equal length, with 100 lines being chosen for
commensurability. Participants were primarily engaged in two
7
The first phase of this project is described in greater detail in Wigglesworth and
Simpson(2008, see esp. pp. 19–27). The second phase of the project, currently
underway, is investigating issues faced by Indigenous children as they enter the
formal school system where they encounter Standard Australian English, of which
they often have little knowledge, as well as significant cultural differences.
http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
Time 2-time 1
types of tasks: prompted play (for example using toy cash registers, a doctor’s kit or building with wooden blocks) and picture
book-prompted story telling (Egan, 1986; O’Shannessy, 2004).
The data are a subset of materials collected in the first phase
of a longitudinal study, The Australian Child Language Acquisition project (ACLA)7 , now in its second phase. The first phase
of the project focused on caregiver input to young Indigenous
children, who were between the ages of 18 months and two and
a half years at the beginning of the project. Language data were
collected from children and caregivers every 6-months over a 4year period. While data were collected in three remote Australian
communities, this paper focuses only on Yakanarra and Tennant
Creek.
In the transcripts, each morpheme was coded as either the
local contact variety, or as the traditional language. It was not
always straightforward to determine which words have been
incorporated as loan words (and so should be coded as Kriol), and
which are simply the product of code-switching (and so should
be coded as traditional language). This is in part because no
definitive description of the Kriol lexicon exists in either location. However, we were able to consistently apply our analysis
across the data, with work on the Kriol lexicon in Yakanarra
by Hudson (1985), and with Sandefur (1979) and Lee (2004)
guiding our transcription, glossing and, in some areas, description of both the Tennant Creek and Yakanarra data. Words were
coded as traditional language when the phonological and semantic structure matched that of the traditional language. All other
cases were coded as the contact variety. In the extracts given
throughout this paper, tokens identified as Walmajarri or Warumungu are underlined. Standard English, while certainly used
in some instances in these communities, was not found in the
child-caregiver interactions that we recorded.
For this study, we have collapsed acrolectal and basilectal Kriol
forms into one category, despite the fact that speakers vary considerably along a continuum with respect to this. Separating out
these varieties is, in practice, next to impossible as many elements
are shared across the continuum and variation occurs in relation
All participants were female with the exception of Andrew in
Yakanarra. At Time 1, they ranged in age from 1;8 to 3;6, and at
time 2 from 3;7 to 5;6. The age range between the two time periods varied from 1;8 to 2;5, (average 2;0) with five children having
exactly 2 years between the two times. The average age of the children in Tennant Creek at time 1 was 2;3 and 4;2 at Time 2; in
Yakanarra it was 2;8 at time 1 and 4;10 at time 2. The caregivers
range from being in their early twenties to early thirties, while
BM is in her early seventies.
The fact that age is not balanced across the sessions is a limitation, but a reflection of the reality of data collection in Indigenous
communities. In Indigenous Australia, people tend to be highly
mobile. Communities are small and members are often traveling
between different communities, visiting family and taking part
in local events across a region. Following participants to record
them in other locations is not feasible, given the remoteness of
the communities and the distance that would need to be covered. As such, we have had to make compromises as far as exact
comparability of child ages and difference between sessions is
concerned. Furthermore, in Indigenous Australia, caregiving is
shared by a range of older kin, including older children (i.e., the
“kid mob” Hamilton, 1981; Andrews, 2008), grandparents and
great grandparents and children therefore receive language input
from a diverse group of speakers. To achieve maximal comparability, we have limited our study to four dyads in each location, and to child-caregiver interactions. This poses limitations
to the breadth of representation of the range of participants and
speech styles in such inherently dynamic speech settings. Despite
this, we expect that results will be an important contribution
to knowledge in the field of child language generally, with data
from rarely studied locations which are undergoing rapid language shift, and where little is known about how children acquire
language.
6
Child age time 2
6
April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 514
Vaughan et al.
Child-caregiver interaction in Indigenous Australia
although there are small increases in its use between T1 and T2.
This is commensurate with our findings in Yakanarra (i.e., Loakes
et al., 2013), where we saw that the older people in the community
were more likely to use the traditional language in their interactions with children than younger adults were, as a result of which
children used more traditional language in response. Similarly
children sometimes responded entirely in Kriol when spoken to
by older people entirely in the traditional language (Loakes et al.,
2013)—a case of “receptive multilingualism” (see e.g., ten Thije
and Zeevaert, 2007; ten Thije et al., 2012), or “two-way” conversation (Elwell, 1982). Meakins (2008) made similar observations
in Kalkaringi for Gurindji and Gurindji Kriol.
A more detailed examination of the nature of the interaction between the codes may provide some insights about the
ongoing pragmatic and interactional role of traditional languages. In Extract 1, where Melanie is looking at a picture book
with her mother, the turn is predominantly in Wumpurrarni
English, but with Warumungu (underlined) used occasionally.
The Warumungu-usage which priviledges nouns (e.g., julaka
“bird”) and case-markers (such as the possessive –kayi) is
typical.
to interlocutor and topic as well as age and idiolect. Since distinguishing Kriol varieties is not a central concern of this study,
we have not attempted such a categorization. While the resultant
procedure is broad, and potentially limiting in terms of overrepresenting the traditional language, this exact coding procedure worked well for the Yakanarra data analyzed by Loakes et al.
(2013). In that study, we were able to demonstrate distinct differences across age-groups in terms of language use with the contact
variety, FVKriol, used as the main language by all speakers when
interacting with young children. However, the traditional language Walmajarri, while rarely used by younger people, was used
about a third of the time by speakers over the age of 50.
The following quantitative measures were used:
• Mean length of turn (MLT)
• MLT ratio
• Mean length of utterance (MLU)
This battery of measures illustrates the overall utterance length
(MLT), conversational load (MLT ratio) and sentence complexity
(MLU). Mean length of turn is the ratio of words to turn, where
a turn is “a sequence of utterances spoken by a single speaker”
(McWhinney, 2012, p. 92). MLT ratio is a related measure, calculated by dividing the focus child MLT over interlocutor MLT.
Where the value is below 1.0 the interactant has a greater conversational burden, and greater than 1.0 means the child has a
greater share (see McWhinney, 2012, p. 40).
Mean length of utterance is a measure of morphosyntactic
complexity and consists of the ratio of morphemes to utterances,
where an utterance can range from a single token to a full clause.
MLU has not been without its critics, but has been widely used
to measure children’s language development despite criticisms
relating to its lack of sensitivity to social context, and the unrepresentativeness of the early populations sampled by psycholinguists
(e.g., Geneshi and Glupczynski, 2006). As one of a battery of
measures though, it remains a valid technique.
While we acknowledge that these measures are limited in their
depth of analysis, the approach has been chosen to provide an
initial comparison of language use to and by children in the communities. It is by no means exhaustive. But to date, there has been
no quantitative, longitudinal study of children’s language development in these indigenous communities: this study is, thus, a
first step in that direction.
Extract 1: Melanie 4;3 and mother MM, T2.
MM:
dat lil
julaka bin go na
DET little bird
PST go LOC
na
im-kayi mami
3S POSS mother now
the little bird went to its
mother.
MM:
yu luk deya
2S look there
see there.
MM:
im- kayi mami
i bin kraiin fo
3S POSS mother 3S PST cry
for
im
3S
his mother was crying for him.
MM:
i bin ran wai dumuj
i bin
3S PST run away because 3S PST
git los
get lost
he ran away from because he got
lost.
Results
Language Use
Similarly, in Yakanarra, in Extract 2 Olivia and her mother
are sharing a book and code-switching between FVKriol and
Walmajarri (underlined).
In both communities, the local Kriol variety was used overwhelmingly at T1 and T2 by both children and caregivers—
well over 90% of morphemes. The exceptions were at T1 where
Belinda used the Warumungu words karnanti (“mother”), kampaju (“father”), and kupunta (“burn”), repeatedly, and Melanie
uttered only four morphemes, one of which was in Warumungu.
Belinda’s great-grandmother, BM, is a fluent Warumungu speaker
who uses Warumungu frequently, including in her interactions
with children. Similarly in Yakanarra, children and their caregivers use the traditional language at very low rates overall,
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
Extract 2: Olivia 2;7 and mother OM, T1.
7
OM:
hu dijan?
Who this one
Who’s this one?
Olivia:
pirla
ghost
April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 514
Vaughan et al.
Child-caregiver interaction in Indigenous Australia
OM:
na parri det parri parri parri
No boy
DEM boy
boy
boy
no boy, that’s a boy, boy, boy.
Olivia:
ei parri
Yes boy
yeah boy
TABLE 2 | MLT observations for focus children and caregivers, Tennant
Creek.
Again, it is typically nouns that elicit Walmajarri. Indeed, Loakes
et al. (2012) demonstrated that children in Yakanarra have a
relatively good receptive knowledge of Walmajarri nouns related
to the presence of these words in their input. Nouns are not the
only targets of switching however. The traditional language is
also used frequently for tag questions (e.g., payi “is that OK?”
as in Extract 6 below). And in the following example, Emily’s
mother (EM) issues her command first in Walmajarri and then
in Kriol. This use of both languages in parallel utterances has
also been documented in Tennant Creek speech styles (Disbray,
2008):
yutanti
Sit-down-IMP
sit down
EM:
sidan
Sit
down
sit down.
Child (T2)
CG (T1)
CG (T2)
Natalie and NM
2.0
1.4
4.1
24.6
Melanie and MM
2.0
4.3
6.3
26.3
Sarah and SM
1.8
5.5
6.6
35.3
Belinda and BM
1.9
5.2
8.3
15.1
Average
1.9
4.1
6.3
25.3
Time 1
Time 2
Natalie and NM
0.48
0.06
Melanie and MM
0.32
0.16
Sarah and SM
0.27
0.16
Belinda and BM
0.23
0.35
Average
0.33
0.18
Of course in cases of multilingual language acquisition there is
the added complication that young children may not yet have
learnt to discriminate between codes as the adult target does.
This is not a question we will dwell on here, but it is important
to acknowledge that the necessity of distinguishing codes for the
purpose of quantitative analysis can obfuscate the social reality
in terms of how speakers actually understand and manipulate
codes.
As we have seen, the contact varieties of Wumpurrarni English
and FVKriol are the preferred languages for communication, but
the traditional languages, Warumungu and Walmajarri, have a
continued presence in interaction through a range of multilingual practices. Both communities appear to demonstrate similar
uses of the traditional language in terms of the linguistic interaction of codes. However, an understanding of the social aspects
of code use will require further research. In the next section we
focus on how children’s productive language develops across the
time periods.
Receptive multilingualism, i.e., the use of one language per participant in an interaction is known to be a common practice in
these communities (see e.g., the example in Loakes et al. (2013,
p. 700) where a child speaks FVKriol to her grandmother and
is responded to in Walmajarri). In Yakanarra it appears to be
largely an intergenerational practice, and so perhaps is a product
of language shift, but this is not the case in all communities (e.g.,
in Maningrida, Arnhem Land—see Elwell, 1982). Indeed, this
kind of code-switching is known to have been a stable linguistic
practice traditionally with distinct pragmatic and social functions
(Wilkins and Nash, 2008; Singer and Harris, forthcoming).
Code-switching raises a number of issues and questions for
our analysis and for research of this kind more generally. Firstly,
it presents a challenge for data analysis in that while it is uncontroversial in theory that code-switching differs from lexical borrowing (i.e., where a foreign word has been fully adapted into a
host language), it is not always clear in practice (Poplack, 2004).
For example, if the surface form is uninflected, if it occupies
a slot shared by both languages, and/or if phonological cues
are absent or unclear, the task is by no means a straightforward one. The challenge is mitigated to some extent by the fact
that the researchers know the communities well and are able to
make judgments based on their knowledge of the standard adult
language and common community linguistic practices. Furthermore, the methodological issue begs a larger question regarding the social reality of code distinction: are speakers attending
to the difference between codes? If not, should the researcher?8
Developmental Measures
Mean Length of Turn (MLT)
The MLT provides an impression of overall utterance length,
while the related measure, MLT ratio, reflects the conversational
load of each interactant. MLT is the average of the number of
words used per turn, while conversational load is the ratio of child
MLT over caregiver MLT.
MLT values and the associated MLT ratios are shown in
Tables 2, 3 below for Tennant Creek.
As might be expected, the Tennant Creek children use slightly
more than double the number of words per turn at T2 compared to T1. At T1 the children all appear to be at a similar
stage, with results ranging from 1.8 to 2.0 words per turn on
average. At Time 2, all of the children, except Natalie, have a
8 See work on code-mixing and “translanguaging” for further exploration of these
points, especially (García, 2007; Creese and Blackledge, 2010; García and Wei,
2014).
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
Child (T1)
TABLE 3 | MLT ratios, Tennant Creek.
Extract 3: EM’s direction to Emily 2;6, T1.
EM:
Tennant Creek
8
April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 514
Vaughan et al.
Child-caregiver interaction in Indigenous Australia
marked increase in words usage, ranging from 4.3 to 5.5 words
per turn. And as we see below, Natalie’s results may be task
based.
For the caregivers, MLT values are always higher than the
children’s, especially at Time 2. At Time 1, the average MLT
was 6.3 with a range of 4.1–8.3. However, the most striking
result from this table is the average length of utterances used
by the caregivers at Time 2, with an average of 25.3 words per
turn, equating to four times as many words per turn on average than used at Time 1. Results for individual speakers range
from 15.1 for Belinda’s great-grandmother to 35.3 for Sarah’s
mother.
Extract 4 is from Sarah’s mother at T2 and clearly shows
the relatively monologic nature of her talk. She is telling
a story and is not often interrupted by Sarah. This type
of narration routine was observed in a previous study of
Tennant Creek child-caregiver interaction (Disbray, 2008).
Here adults tended to tell “elaborate” stories possibly as a
strategy to maintain the children’s attention and to model
story-telling.
SM:
In Extract 5, Natalie is playing with blocks, and her mother provides a series of requests and explanations. She draws the child’s
attention to the construction depicted on the box containing the
blocks, encouraging the child to build a similar construction.
The especially long number of words per turn is typical of this
session, yet markedly different to the length of utterance for the
same speaker at T1. In this particular case, NM uses 32 words
before Natalie’s one word response.
Extract 5: NM’s interaction with Natalie 4;7, Time 2.
Extract 4: SM’s interaction with Sarah 3;6, Time 2.
SM:
SM:
deya im- kayi mami
na
There 3S POSS mother now
there’s it’s mother now
iya damob
bin jeis-im na
Here that group PST chase-TR now
luk
look
here, that group were chasing it,
now look.
im
dubala bin jeis-im bat
2 NOM PST chase-TR QUANT9 3S
na
now
two of them were chasing it now.
NM:
yu gid dat pitja
deya luk
2S get Dem picture there look
you get that picture there, look.
NM:
si deya
See there
see there.
NM:
yu trai du dat
2S try do that
you try to do that
NM:
luk, dem deya
Look 3Pl there
look, them there.
NM:
yu kin meik haus
2S can make house
you can make a house.
NM:
kasel
castle
castle.
NM:
si tivi an bed yu kin meik im
See TV
and bed 2S can make 3S
see the TV and bed, you can make
them
Sarah:
na na dat dat
Now now DEM DEM
now now, that that.
SM:
stik bin pok-im im
Stick PST poke-TR 3S
the stick poked him.
NM:
luk what kain pants
Look what kind pants
look what kind of pants.
kwik
quickly
quickly.
NM:
weya dat Harvey?
Where that Harvey
where’s that Harvey?
SM:
SM:
SM:
SM:
stik bin pok-im im
Stick PST poke-TR 3S
the stick poked him.
Natalie: dawan
That one
that one.
im, gad, im still gad shangayi
3S got 3S still got shanghai
he’s got, he’s still got the
shanghai (sling-shot).
The related MLT ratio (child/caregiver MLT) or conversational
load is one way of representing the proportion of the utterance
attributable to each speaker. We can expect this to be low at T2
given the long caregiver utterances as shown in Table 310 .
These data suggest the conversational burden rests mostly
with the caregivers in all instances, although T2 is more variable
wan bala jeis-im
One 3NOM chase-TR
one of them chases it.
9
10
“bat” is an event quantifier indicating the event is not performed once by one
individual.
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
A ratio of 1 would indicate equality in conversational load, and any value less
than 1 means the caregiver has a greater conversational burden than the child.
9
April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 514
Vaughan et al.
Child-caregiver interaction in Indigenous Australia
TABLE 5 | MLT ratios, Yakanarra.
TABLE 4 | MLT observations for focus children and caregivers, Yakanarra.
Child (T1)
Child (T2)
CG (T1)
CG (T2)
Time 1
Time 2
Katherine and KM
5.3
2.5
10.2
7.6
Katherine and KM
0.52
0.33
Olivia and OM
3.1
5.2
7.6
8.9
Olivia and OM
0.41
0.58
Andrew and AM
2.3
5.1
27.3
14.8
Andrew and AM
0.08
0.34
Emily and EM
4.7
4.7
5.1
3.3
Emily and EM
0.92
1.42
Average
3.9
4.4
12.6
8.7
Average
0.48
0.67
than T1 with a low MLT for Natalie and her mother, reflective of
Natalie’s minimal talk during the wooden block play, as seen in
Extract 5 above. Melanie and Sarah have the same MLT ratio at
T2 and Belinda is the only child to take on more of the conversational load at T2 compared to T1 increasing from 0.23 to 0.35
(still relatively low).
The picture at Yakanarra is different, with more variability
amongst participants, as shown in Table 4 which presents the
MLT.
For the Yakanarra child participants, there is little difference
between T1 and T2, on average. At T1, their average MLT is
around double the average of the Tennant Creek children (at
1.9), and at T2 their MLT of 4.4 is only marginally higher than at
Time 1, and than the Tennant Creek children’s MLT at T2 (4.1).
Thus, while Yakanarra children have a much higher average MLT
at T1, by T2 they are very similar. It is likely that the MLT difference between Tennant Creek and Yakanarra children at T1 is
linked to the difference in the average age between participants,
since the Tennant Creek children are younger. At T1, the Yakanarra children’s MLT values correlate with their age: Katherine
is the oldest participant and has an MLT of 5.3, but Andrew, the
youngest only averages 2.3. At Time 2 however, Katherine has the
lowest MLT.
There is considerable variation in Yakanarra. Two children
increase in MLT from T1 to T2 (Olivia and Andrew), and two do
not—Katherine’s MLT is lower at T2, while Emily’s is the same.
Thus, the range of values for MLT is quite broad at both times,
between 2.3 and 5.3 words per turn at T1, and 2.5–5.2 at T2.
This differs from the Tennant Creek results where the MLT fitted
within a narrow range at each time period.
For the caregivers, results are also different from Tennant
Creek. At T1, the Yakanarra children have twice the average
words per turn than Tennant Creek children, and this is also
true for caregivers, where the average 12.6 words per turn is double those for Tennant Creek. At T2, Yakanarra caregivers have a
lower MLT than at T1, while in Tennant Creek they were four
times higher. Additionally, MLT values for the Tennant Creek
caregivers fall within a relatively narrow range of values, whereas
for the Yakanarra caregivers there is a wide range from 5.1 to 27.3
at T1 and from 3.3 to 14.8 at T2. Finally, three Yakanarra caregivers have similar MLT values to their children; the exception is
Andrew and AM, with AM having exceptionally high MLT values
(27.3 at T1, and 14.8 at T12). This is reflected in the MLT ratio, as
shown in Table 5.
Yakanarra children have, on average, a higher MLT than the
Tennant Creek children at both time periods. This indicates
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
that the Yakanarra children generally have a greater share of the
conversation when interacting with their caregivers compared
to the Tennant Creek children in these sessions. While neither
group is approaching an equal conversational load, the Yakanarra children have a higher MLT ratio at T1 than the Tennant
Creek children had at both T1 and T2, and they increase their
conversational share at T2.
A brief note about individual variation is important given
these results. At T1, Andrew’s ratio is especially low at 0.08
indicating that he barely contributes, verbally, to the interaction. Emily, on the other hand, has an MLT ratio approaching 1.0 suggesting equal conversational load between her and
her mother. At T2, Katherine and Andrew have similar, relatively low, MLT ratios although this is an increase for Andrew,
but a decrease for Katherine. Emily is the only participant with
a higher conversational burden than her mother. Emily’s input
remains the same at T1 and T2, but her mother’s changes, with
less input at T2 (see Extract 10 for an example of this pair’s
interaction).
Extracts 6 and 7 from Olivia’s interaction with OM are from
an identical task where a book is being read. At T1, Olivia
averaged three words per turn on average, and five at T2. OM
averaged 7.6 words per turn at T1 and 9 at T2 yielding a slightly
greater conversational load for Olivia at T2.
Extract 6: OM’s interaction with Olivia 2;7, Time 1.
10
OM:
en wat i bin du?
And what 3S PST do
And what has it done?
OM:
luk wat i bin du?
Look what 3S PST do
look, what has it done?
OM:
i bin fol dan, payi?
3S PST fall down isn’t it
It’s fallen down, hasn’t it?
Olivia:
ye
yes
yeah.
OM:
oi i bin fol dan
Oh 3S PST fall down
oh, it’s fallen down.
Olivia:
no i rait.
No 3S right
no its OK.
April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 514
Vaughan et al.
Child-caregiver interaction in Indigenous Australia
M:
en we
det jikjik la is
And where the chicken LOC 3S
mami, payi?
mother isn’t it
and where is that chicken’s - its
at his mother’s isn’t it?
Olivia:
im iya
3S here
it’s here.
differently to others. In Extract 8, they are looking at figurines,
and the reasons for Andrew’s comparatively low MLT (5.1 to
AM’s 14.8) as well as relatively low conversational load (0.38), are
clear.
Extract 8: AM’s interaction with Andrew 4;7, Time 2.
AM:
At T2, the development in Olivia’s interactional capability is
clear. Here she has more, and longer turns, than at T1.
Extract 7: OM’s interaction with Olivia 4;7, Time 2.
OM:
Olivia:
Olivia:
Olivia:
OM:
ei dis da mami
wan fo det
Hey Dem is mother NOM for Dem
beibi
baby
hey this is the mother for that
baby,
si i garra bodul.
See 3S get
bottle
see it’s got a bottle.
en we
dijan fo shanghai?
And where Dem
for shanghai
and where is the shanghai
(sling-shot).
Andrew:
de
there
there
hu detwan?
Who that
one
who’s that?
AM:
den dei tjeis-im bat
im tjeis
Then 3Pl chase-TR QUANT 3S chase
then they chase it, chase
ai dono
hu det
1S don’t know who Dem
I don’t know who that is.
Andrew:
im bat im tjeis-im bat
im
3S but 3S chase-TR QUANT 3S
it, chased it.
xxx ting.
Xxx thing
[unintelligible word] thing
AM:
a pupala
Ah poorthing
ah poor thing.
ye lil
skul
gel
Yes little school girl
yeah it’s a little school girl.
AM:
en diswan
god lil
And this one got little
mobailfon
mobile phone
and this one has got a little
mobile phone.
Olivia:
ye
yes
yeah.
OM:
dei bin ged im hepi
3PL PST get 3S happy
They were happy.
AM:
yu luk-im lil
mobailfon
2S look-TR little mobile phone
you look, a little mobile phone.
Olivia
la nes i bin bi
LOC nest 3S PST be
it was in the nest
Andrew:
ye ai garram iya
Yes 1S got
here
yeah I’ve got it here.
Olivia:
we
is
mami
wan?
Where POSS mother Det
where is its mother?
Olivia:
de?
there
there?
OM:
na is
mami
bin go ged-im
No POSS mother PST go get-TR
no its mother has gone
In this section, we have seen that utterance length is used differently in each of the two communities analyzed. In Tennant Creek,
both children and caregivers tend to have an increase in MLT over
time. As illustrated, the caregivers use exceptionally long utterances at Time 2, and this impacts on conversational load where
we saw that Tennant Creek children take on less of the overall
conversational burden at Time 2. The Yakanarra caregivers, by
contrast, use shorter utterances on average at Time 2, while the
children have slightly longer utterances. In Yakanarra, the children’s conversational burden is generally greater at Time 2, and
one of the children actually has a higher conversational load than
her caregiver.
The caregivers in the two communities seem to respond differently with respect to quantity of talk. Tennant Creek caregivers
bat
mangarri bla im
QUANT food
for him
to get food for it.
Recall that Andrew is the youngest child in the Yakanarra
cohort, and his interaction with his mother patterned somewhat
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
11
April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 514
Vaughan et al.
Child-caregiver interaction in Indigenous Australia
use more talk at Time 2 perhaps recognizing their children’s
increased receptive capacity, while the Yakanarra participants use
less talk on average perhaps making room for their children’s productive capacity. It may be the age difference of the children, with
the children older at Yakanarra, that elicits this response.
i bin jamp of fom dat nes
3S Pst jump off from Dem nest
it jumped off from that nest
Melanie: an dei gada
gid im na
And 3Pl got to get 3S now
ini?
isn’t it
and they have to get it now,
don’t they?
MLU
MLU is a measure of morphological complexity, reflecting the
ratio of morphemes to utterances, and is generally considered
useful for comparing development across time points. MLU is
often compared to standardized values, but this is not possible
here as there are no standardized MLU values for Kriol and the
traditional languages featured. However, values can be used comparatively across the corpus. In this study, MLU is measured
using morphemes primarily from Kriol, with some traditional
language morphemes also included in the analysis. This is justified because, as seen earlier, the number of traditional language
morphemes used by participants was very minimal. MLU values
for Tennant Creek are presented in Table 6 below.
All children and their caregivers use morphologically more
complex utterances at T2 with the children having the greatest
increase from 1.7 to 5.3. At T2, both groups have a similar average MLU (5.3 and 5.6), reflecting similar grammatical complexity
despite the marked differences in utterance length described earlier. At T1 the caregivers tend to have a much higher MLU than
their children (besides Natalie and NM), but at T2 they are almost
at parity. The exception is Melanie and MM, with MM having a
higher MLU than Melanie.
As with MLT, the Tennant Creek data again falls within a
relatively narrow range, although Natalie and NM have somewhat lower MLUs, and Melanie and MM slightly higher values.
Extract 5 gave an example of Natalie and NM’s interaction at
T2 and Extract 9 is an example from Melanie and MM’s (see
also Extract 1). Verbal morphemes (preceded by an underscore)
help to explain the higher MLU. Both participants use relatively
long utterances providing a useful illustration of average turn
length.
Yakanarra results for MLU are shown below.
In Yakanarra, MLU is narrower than Tennant Creek between
2.4 and 4.4, with caregivers having a higher MLU than the children at both times. Emily and EM are the exception to this, with
Emily’s MLU at T2 slightly higher than EM’s. MLU increases
at T2 for the children, and decreases slightly for the caregivers.
Individual variation is fairly minimal as with the other measures
analyzed in this study.
Average values point to an increase in child MLU across the
time periods, with three of the four children showing higher MLU
values at Time 2 (an increase of 1.2 in each case). Katherine is
the exception here, with a slightly higher MLU at Time 1 (3.0
compared with 2.6). For the caregivers, average MLU decreased
slightly across the time periods. Results in Table 7 show that this
is the case for all except OM, who has a slightly higher MLU at
Time 2 (4.4 compared with 5.0).
Examples of Olivia (and OM’s) speech are given in extracts
2, 6, and 7. Extracts 6 (T1) and 7 (T2) in particular illustrate
Olivia’s increase in morpho-syntactic complexity across the
time periods. Extract 10 shows Emily interacting with EM,
which demonstrates EM’s relatively low MLU T2, given the
demonstrably low morpho-syntactic complexity of her turn
(it is also indicative of the pair’s MLT ratio, as discussed
earlier).
Extract 10: EM’s interaction with Emily 4;6, Time 2.
Emily:
en de det beed
And Dem Dem bird
and there, that bird.
an dei bin keriy im,
And 3Pl Pst carry 3S
and they were carrying it,
EM:
yu luk det nes
2Pl look Dem next
you look, that nest.
keriy-im bat
im na
dat nes,
carry-TR QUANT 3S from Dem nest
carrying it from that nest -
Emily
Extract 9: MM’s interaction with Melanie 4;3, Time 2.
MM:
TABLE 6 | MLU, Tennant Creek.
en det nes
And Dem nest
and that nest.
TABLE 7 | MLU, Yakanarra.
Child (T1)
Child (T2)
CG (T1)
CG (T2)
Natalie and NM
1.8
3.7
1.4
3.5
Katherine and KM
3
Melanie and MM
2
6.3
3.9
7.5
Olivia and OM
2.6
Sarah and SM
1.5
5.4
4
5.6
Andrew and AM
2.1
Belinda and BM
1.6
5.9
4.1
5.9
Emily and EM
Average
1.7
5.3
3.4
5.6
Average
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
Child (T1)
12
Child (T2)
CG (T1)
CG (T2)
2.6
5.1
4.4
3.8
4.4
5
3.3
4.8
4.3
2
3.2
3.1
2.7
2.4
3.2
4.4
4.1
April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 514
Vaughan et al.
Emily:
Child-caregiver interaction in Indigenous Australia
language capacity was not clear for Tennant Creek when we analyzed MLT and MLT ratio, we might infer that the especially
long turns used by their caregivers is a response to their greater
receptive knowledge at T2.
While not an explicit focus of this study, work on Baby Talk
registers in Australian languages formed part of the theoretical
grounding of register (see Laughren, 1984; Bavin, 1992, 1993;
Kral and Ellis, 2008; O’Shannessy, 2011; Jones and Meakins, 2013;
Turpin et al., 2014). We are, thus, able to reflect on the language
input to the children in our study with this work in mind. Certain features noted in previous studies were observable in our
data (largely use of repetition (see, e.g., Extract 2) and slower
speech rate), but not the full range of features described in the
studies above. Further research is required to fully investigate
the existence and nature of this register in Tennant Creek and
Yakanarra.
As discussed in the introduction, relatively little is known
about child language development outside middle-class Western
societies, and measures of analysis have tended to develop from
languages spoken in these environments. As such, it is worth
reflecting on our results to determine the validity of the measures
we used for analysing contact varieties. One measure in particular, MLU, was used in this study in quite broadly and language
types were grouped together (i.e., both Kriol and the traditional
language) in calculating it. However, use of the traditional language was quantitatively minimal and so this is unlikely to have
had much impact on results.
A crucial issue, which warrants further investigation, is that
of variation. Heavy Kriol varieties have a more complex morphology and use grammatical and case-marking morphemes not
used in English. At T1, where children ranged between 1;8 and
3;6, there was little evidence that they used such morphology.
However, the children use a wider variety of verbal and nominal morphemes, and more of them, at T2 as reflected in the
higher MLU for both cohorts. This could be for a number of
reasons—the data may indicate acquisition of morphology, but
it may also be an indication that children are using a heavier
style of Kriol at T2. Semantic case-marking is also an optional
feature, often occurring with relatively low frequency, so it may
simply be that case-marking did not appear in the T1 data. In
future work, it will be important for researchers to analyse individual speaker styles closely, and to relate them to children’s
stylistic use. Cross-sectional data from older children in Tennant Creek show use of complex morphology, through the use
of transitive marking on verbs, and semantic case-marking (Disbray, 2009), particularly in heavy WE styles. These results are
useful for contributing to knowledge on the types of values to
expect for Kriol varieties where MLU is concerned, and a more
detailed analysis, beyond the scope of this paper, may throw
further light on this. The results of this study support those of
Hoff (2006) who observed considerable variation in type and
amount of direct language input children in these age groups
received. These communities are undergoing, or have undergone in recent year, sizeable shifts in the languages spoken, commensurate with increasing variability in the input the children
receive (see Loakes et al. (2013) for further discussion of this
phenomenon).
en de
i flaiing
And there 3S flying
and there it’s flying.
These MLU results indicate that in both communities the children use grammatically more complex utterances at T2. At both
times, caregivers use more complex utterances than their children, but in Yakanarra the caregivers use less complex utterances
at T2 than at T1. In other words, while children’s language is
developing over the 2-year period, as would be expected, caregiver responses pattern differently in each community.
Discussion and Conclusion
This study compared language use in two remote Indigenous
Australian communities. Reflecting a loss of the traditional languages of the area, creole varieties—Wumpurrarni English and
Fitzroy Valley Kriol, respectively—are used predominantly by the
child-caregiver pairs studied in Tennant Creek and Yakanarra.
The individual variation in language use observed was consistent
with our previous study in Yakanarra where traditional language
tends to be reserved for use by, and with, older participants aged
50+ (e.g., Loakes et al., 2013). McConvell (2008) also discusses
a general trend for language shift in Indigenous Australia, where
children appear to be largely monolingual (speaking a variety of
Kriol). This compares to the situation previously in Australia,
where community members tended to be multilingual in two or
more traditional languages as well as English (e.g., Brandl and
Walsh, 1982; Singer and Harris, forthcoming).
While our results point to a general decline in multilingualism
and its attendant linguistic practices in Indigenous Australia, we
have noted a range of uses for the surviving elements of the traditional languages featured. Code-switching and receptive multilingualism have important social and pragmatic functions, even,
or perhaps especially, in cases of language change. Indeed, it can
be the case that low-frequency linguistic forms carry significant
pragmatic force (i.e., contributing to “markedness”). McConvell
(2008) notes that such uses of traditional languages may have
strong social meaning as “acts of identity” (see also Le Page and
Tabouret-Keller, 1985).
As found in the early studies of caregiver talk (e.g., Snow, 1972,
1977; Sachs et al., 1976; Ferguson, 1977) for the caregivers in Tennant Creek, speech increases in MLT with age, reflecting similar
patterns of development and we may assume, consequently, that
caregivers make similar adjustments in terms of fine-tuning to
their speech as those found in previous studies such as Vosoughi
(2010) and that this is a function of the child’s age. In contrast,
the Yakanarra caregivers tend to use shorter and fewer turns at
T2, and may respond to their children’s language development
by making room for their productive language capacity. For caregivers then, the main difference across the communities is the
quantity of talk used.
In both Tennant Creek and Yakanarra we observed the general
developmental characteristics of focus children using data collected approximately 2 years apart. The children displayed more
developed language skills at T2, an unsurprising result given that
they were on average 2 years older than at T1. While productive
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
13
April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 514
Vaughan et al.
Child-caregiver interaction in Indigenous Australia
Tennant Creek were younger at the start of the study than those
in Yakanarra.
In tandem with Loakes et al.’s (2013) findings for Yakanarra,
this research has contributed to a depiction of both language
input to children, as well as their own language production.
The former study elucidated how this language varies synchronically (according to interlocutor age), while the current study has
focused on how children’s language varies diachronically across
time points 2 years apart. These results are a start in developing a picture of how children acquire language in these two
multilingual Indigenous Australian communities.
This study has provided an initial insight into child-caregiver
interaction in two remote Indigenous communities. Despite the
different community structures—with Yakanarra being relatively
closed, and Tennant Creek having more varied demographics—
results are similar in terms of general developmental patterns,
and the language types used. The creole variety local to each community is the preferred language of communication at both time
points. For measures of morphosyntactic complexity (MLU),
children in both communities use more complex utterances at T2
than at T1, and child-caregiver averages are similar to each other
at T2. For measures of utterance length (MLT), there are more
notable differences between the two communities for both children and caregivers at T2; for children in Tennant Creek, MLT
doubled on average between T1 and T2, while in Yakanarra children were more variable. Strikingly, caregivers’ MLT quadrupled
between T1 and T2 in Tennant Creek, while in Yakanarra caregivers’ MLT was lower at T2 than T1. We note, however, that
the samples used here were convenience samples, and very small
ones with only four dyads in each community. We may attribute
some of the different results also to the fact that the children in
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank all the participants, children and adults
who contributed data to this study. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, and to Jane Simpson for assistance with the interlinear glossing. The study was
supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Grants
(DP0343189 and DP0877762).
References
Creese, A., and Blackledge, A. (2010). Translanguaging in the bilingual classroom: a pedagogy for learning and teaching? Mod. Lang. J. 94, 103–115. doi:
10.1111/j.1540-4781.2009.00986.x
De Houwer, A. (1999). “Environmental factors in early bilingual development: the role of parental beliefs and attitudes,” in Bilingualism and
Migration, eds G. Extra and L. Verhoeven (New York, NY: Mouton de
Gruyter), 75–96.
De Houwer, A. (2005). “Early bilingual acquisition: focus on morphosyntax and the
separate development hypothesis,” in Handbook of Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic Approaches, eds J. F. Kroll and A. M. B. De Groot (Oxford: Oxford University
Press), 30–48.
De Houwer, A. (2007). Parental language input patterns and children’s
bilingual use. Appl. Psycholinguist. 28, 411–424. doi: 10.1017/S0142716407
070221
Díaz-Campos, M. (2005). “The emergence of adult-like command of sociolinguistic variables: a study of consonant weakening in Spanish-speaking children,” in
Studies in the Acquisition of the Hispanic Languages: Papers from the 6th conference on the acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese as first and second languages,
ed D. Eddington (Somerville, MA: Cascadilla), 56–65.
Disbray, S. (2008). “Story-telling styles: a study of adult-child interactions
in narrations of a picture book in Tennant Creek,” in Children’s Language and Multilingualism: Indigenous Language Use at Home and School,
eds J. Simpson and G. Wigglesworth (London: Continuum International
Press), 56–98.
Disbray, S. (2009). More than One Way to Catch a Frog: Children’s Discourse in a
Contact Setting. Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Melbourne.
Disbray, S., and Simpson, J. (2004). The expression of possession in Wumpurrarni
English, Tennant Creek. Monash Univ. Linguist. Papers 4, 65–86.
Eades, D. (1996). “Aboriginal english,” in Atlas of Languages of Intercultural
Communication in the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas, eds S. A. Wurm,
P. Mühlhäusler, and D. T. Tryon (Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter),
133–141.
Egan, A. (1986). Pintaru-kurlu “The Quail”. Yuendumu, NT: Bilingual Resources
Development Unit.
Elwell, V. M. R. (1982). Some social factors affecting multilingualism among Aboriginal Australians: a case study of Maningrida. Int. J. Soc. Lang. 36, 83–103.
doi: 10.1515/ijsl.1982.36.83
Ferguson, C. A. (1977). “Baby talk as a simplified register,” in Talking to Children:
Language Input and Acquisition, eds C. E. Snow and C. A. Ferguson (New York,
NY: Cambridge University Press), 219–235.
Andrews, J. (2008). “Bringing up our yorta yorta children,” in Contexts of Child
Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention, eds G. Robinson, U. Eickelkamp, J. Goodnow, and I. Katz (Darwin: Charles Darwin University Press),
23–35.
Bavin, E. (1992). “The acquisition of Warlpiri,” in The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, Vol. 3, ed D. I. Slobin (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum),
309–371.
Bavin, E. (1993). “Language and culture: socialization in a Warlpiri community,”
in Language and Culture in Aboriginal Australia, eds M. Walsh and C. Yallop
(Canberra, ACT: Aboriginal Studies Press), 85–96.
Bavin, E., and Shopen, T. (1985). “Warlpiri and English: language in contact,” in
Australia, Meeting Place of Languages, ed M. Clyne (Canberra, ACT: Pacific
Linguistics), 81–94.
Berko Gleason, J. (eds.). (2005). The Development of Language, 6th Edn. Boston:
Pearson/Allyn & Bacon.
Bialystok, E., and Feng, X. (2011). “Language proficiency and its implications for
monolingual and bilingual children,” in Language and Literacy Development
in Bilingual Settings, eds A. Durgunogle and C. Goldenberg (New York, NY:
Guilford), 121–138.
Bornstein, M. H., Haynes, M. O., and Painter, K. M. (1998). Sources of child
vocabulary competence: a multivariate model. J. Child Lang. 25, 367–394. doi:
10.1017/S0305000998003456
Brandl, M. M., and Walsh, M. (1982). Speakers of many tongues: toward understanding multilingualism among Aboriginal Australians. Int. J. Sociol. Lang. 36,
71–81.
Brown, P. (2001). “Learning to talk about motion UP and DOWN in Tzeltal: is
there a language-specific bias for verb learning?” in Language Acquisition and
Conceptual Development, eds M. Bowerman and S. C. Levinson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), 512–543.
Butcher, A. R. (2008). Linguistic aspects of Australian Aboriginal English. Clin.
Linguist. Phon. 22, 625–642. doi: 10.1080/02699200802223535
Conboy, B. T., and Thal, D. J. (2006). Ties between the lexicon and grammar: crosssectional and longitudinal studies of bilingual toddlers. Child Dev. 77, 712–735.
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00899.x
Crago, M. B., Allen, S. E. M., and Hough-Eyamie, W. P. (1997). “Exploring innateness through cultural and linguistic variation: an Inuit example,” in The Biological Basis of Language, ed M. J. Gopnik (Oxford: Oxford University Press),
70–90.
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
14
April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 514
Vaughan et al.
Child-caregiver interaction in Indigenous Australia
Kaye, K. (1980). Why we don’t “baby talk” to babies. J. Child Lang. 7, 498–507. doi:
10.1017/S0305000900002804
Kral, I., and Ellis, E. M. (2008). “Children, language and literacy in the Ngaanyatjarra lands,” in Children’s Language and Multilingualism, eds J. Simpson and G.
Wigglesworth (London: Continuum), 154–172.
Kulick, D. (1992). Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction. Socialization, Self and
Syncretism in a Papua New Guinean Village. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Lanza, E. (1997). Language Mixing in Infant Bilingualism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Laughren, M. (1984). Warlpiri Baby Talk. Aust. J. Linguist. 4, 73–88. doi:
10.1080/07268608408599321
Lee, J. (1987). Tiwi Today: A Study of Language Change in a Contact Situation.
Canberra, ACT: Pacific Linguistics.
Lee, J. (2004). Kriol-Ingglish Dikshenri. SIL Darwin: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Le Page, R., and Tabouret-Keller, A. (1985). Acts of Identity: Creole-Based
Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
LeVine, R. A. (2004). “Challenging expert knowledge: findings from an African
study of infant care and development,” in Childhood and Adolescence: CrossCultural Perspectives and Applications, eds U. P. Gielen and J. Roopnarine
(Westport, CT: Praeger), 149–165.
Lieven, E. V. M. (1994). “Crosslinguistic and crosscultural aspects of language
addressed to children,” in Input and Interaction in Language Acquisition, eds
C. Galloway and B. J. Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
56–73.
Loakes, D., Moses, K., Simpson, J., and Wigglesworth, G. (2012). Developing tests for the assessment of traditional language skill: a case study in
an Indigenous Australian community. Lang. Assess. Q. 9, 311–330. doi:
10.1080/15434303.2011.653918
Loakes, D., Moses, K., Wigglesworth, G., Simpson, J., and Billington, R. (2013).
Children’s language input: a study of a remote multilingual Indigenous Australian community. Multilingua 32, 683–711. doi: 10.1515/mult-2013-0032
Luykx, A. (2005). “Children as socializing agents: family language policy in situations of language shift,” in Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium
on Bilingualism, eds J. Cohen, K. T. McAlister, K. Rolstad, and J. MacSwan
(Somerville, MA: Cascadilla), 1407–1414.
Makihara, M. (2005). Rapa Nui ways of speaking Spanish: language
shift and socialization on Easter Island. Lang. Soc. 34, 727–762. doi:
10.1017/S004740450505027X
Malcolm, I. (1996). Observations on the variability in the verb phrase in Aboriginal English. Aust. J. Linguist. 16, 145–165. doi: 10.1080/072686096085
99536
Malcolm, I., and Kaldor, S. (1991). “Aboriginal English – an overview,” in Language
in Australia, ed S. Romaine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 67–83.
Malcolm, I. G., and Sharifian, F. (2002). Aspects of Aboriginal English oral
discourse: an application of cultural schema theory. Discourse Stud. 4, 169-181.
Malcolm, I. G., and Sharifian, F. (2007). “Multiwords in Aboriginal English,” in
Phraseology and Culture in English, ed P. Skandera (Berlin, New York: Mouton
De Gruyter).
Marchman, V., Martinez-Sussman, C., and Dale, P. S. (2004). The languagespecific nature of grammatical development: evidence from bilingual language
learners. Dev. Sci. 7, 212–224. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2004.00340.x
McConvell, P. (2008). “Language mixing and language shift in Indigenous Australia,” in Children’s Language and Multilingualism: Indigenous Language use at
Home and School, eds J. Simpson and G. Wigglesworth (London: Continuum
International Press), 237–260.
McConvell, P., and Meakins, F. (2005). Gurindji Kriol: a mixed language emerges from code-switching. Aust. J. Linguist. 25, 9–30. doi:
10.1080/07268600500110456
McConvell, P., and Thieberger, N. (2001). State of Indigenous Languages in Australia – 2001. Australia State of the Environment Technical Paper Series (Natural and Cultural Heritage), Series 2. Canberra, ACT: Department of the
Environment and Heritage.
McGregor, W. B. (2004). The Languages of the Kimberley, Western Australia.
London: Routledge.
Foulkes, P., Docherty, G. J., and Watt, D. (1999). Tracking the emergence of structured variation: realisations of (t) by Newcastle children. Leeds Work. Pap.
Linguist. Phon. 7, 1–25.
Foulkes, P., Docherty, G. J., and Watt, D. (2005). Phonological variation in
child-directed speech. Language 81, 177–206. doi: 10.1353/lan.2005.0018
Gafaranga, J. (2010). Medium request: talking language shift into being. Lang. Soc.
39, 241–270. doi: 10.1017/S0047404510000047
García, O. (2007). “Foreword,” in Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages, eds
S. Makoni and A. Pennycook (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters), xi-xv.
García, O., and Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and
Education. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Garrett, P. B. (2005). What a language is good for: language socialization, language
shift, and the persistence of code-specific genres in St. Lucia. Lang. Soc. 34,
327–361. doi: 10.1017/S0047404505050128
Garrett, P. B., and Baquedano-López, P. (2002). Language socialization: reproduction and continuity, transformation and change. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 31,
339–361. doi: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.31.040402.085352
Geneshi, C., and Glupczynski, T. (2006). “Language and literacy research: multiple
methods and perspectives,” in Handbook of Complementary Methods in Education Research, eds J. L. Green, G. Camilli, and P. B. Elmore (Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum), 657–680.
Hamilton, A. (1981). Nature and Nurture: Aboriginal Child-rearing in Northcentral Arnhem Land. Canberra, ACT: Australian Institute of Aboriginal
Studies.
Harkness, S. (1977). “Aspects of the social environment and first language acquisition in rural Africa,” in Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition, eds
C. E. Snow and C. A. Ferguson (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press),
309–318.
Harris, J. (1993). “Losing and gaining a language: the story of Kriol in the Northern
Territory,” in Language and Culture in Aboriginal Australia, eds M. Walsh and
C. Yallop (Canberra, ACT: Aboriginal Studies Press), 155–168.
Hart, B., and Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience
of Young American Children. Baltimore, MD: Brookes.
Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways With Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities
and Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hoff, E. (2001). Language Development. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Hoff, E. (2003). The specificity of environmental influence: socioeconomic status affects early vocabulary development via maternal speech. Child Dev. 74,
1368–1378. doi: 10.1111/1467-8624.00612
Hoff, E. (2006). How social contexts support and shape language development.
Dev. Rev. 26, 55–58. doi: 10.1016/j.dr.2005.11.002
Hoff, E., Core, C., Place, S., Rumiche, R., Señor, M., and Parra, M. (2012). Dual language exposure and early bilingual development. J. Child Lang. 39, 1–27. doi:
10.1017/S0305000910000759
Hoff, E., and Naigles, L. (2002). How children use input to acquire a lexicon. Child
Dev. 73, 418–433. doi: 10.1111/1467-8624.00415
Hoff-Ginsberg, E. (1998). The relation of birth order and socioeconomic status to
children’s language experience and language development. Appl. Psycholinguist.
19, 603–629. doi: 10.1017/S0142716400010389
Hudson, J. (1985). Grammatical and Semantic Aspects of Fitzroy Valley Kriol.
Darwin, Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Huttenlocher, J., Haight, W., Bryk, A., Seltzer, M., and Lyons, T. (1991). Early
vocabulary growth: relation to language input and gender. Dev. Psychol. 27,
236–248. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.27.2.236
Huttenlocher, J., Vasilyeva, M., Cymweman, E., and Levine, S. (2002). Language
input at home and at school: relation to child syntax. Cogn. Psychol. 45,
337–374. doi: 10.1016/S0010-0285(02)00500-5
Huttenlocher, J., Vasilyeva, M., Waterfall, H. R., Vevea, J. L., and Hedges, L. V.
(2007). The varieties of speech to young children. Dev. Psychol. 43, 1062–1083.
doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.43.5.1062
Jones, C., and Meakins, F. (2013). The phonological forms and perceived functions of janyarrp, the Gurindji “baby talk” register. Lingua 134, 170–193. doi:
10.1016/j.lingua.2013.07.004
Kaldor, S., and Malcolm, I. (1982). “Aboriginal English in country and remote
areas: a Western Australian perspective,” in English and the Aboriginal Child,
eds R. D. Eagleson, S. Kaldor, and I. Malcolm (Canberra, ACT: Curriculum
Development Centre), 75–112.
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
15
April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 514
Vaughan et al.
Child-caregiver interaction in Indigenous Australia
Poplack, S. (2004). “Code-Switching,” in Sociolinguistics. An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, 2nd Edn., eds U. Ammon, N.
Dittmar, K. J. Mattheier, and P. Trudgill (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter), 589–596.
Pye, C. (1992). “The acquisition of K’iche’ (Maya)”, in The Crosslinguistic Study of
Language Acquisition, Vol. 3, ed D. I. Slobin (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum),
221–308.
Richman, A. L., Miller, P. M., and LeVine, R. A. (1992). Cultural and educational variations in maternal responsiveness. Dev. Psychol. 28, 614–621. doi:
10.1037/0012-1649.28.4.614
Rondal, J. A. (1980). Fathers’ and mothers’ speech in early language development.
J. Child Lang. 7, 353–369. doi: 10.1017/S0305000900002671
Rowe, M. L. (2008). Child-directed speech: relation to socioeconomic status,
knowledge of child development and child vocabulary skill. J. Child Lang. 35,
185–205. doi: 10.1017/S0305000907008343
Sachs, J., Brown, R., and Salerno, R. A. (1976). “Adults’ speech to children,” in Baby
Talk and Infant Speech, eds W. von Raffler-Engel and Y. Lebraun (Lisse: Swets
& Zeitlinger), 240–245.
Sandefur, J. R. (1979). An Australian Creole in the Northern Territory: A Description of Ngukurr-Bamyili Dialects Part 1. Work Papers of SIL-AAB Series B, Vol.
3, Darwin: Summer Institute of Linguistics - Australian Aborigines Branch.
Saxton, M. (2009). “The inevitability of child-directed speech,” in Language Acquisition, ed S. H. Foster-Cohen (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 62–86.
Saxton, M. (2010). Child Language: Acquisition and Development. London: Sage.
Sharifian, F. (2005). Cultural conceptualisations in English words: a
study of Aboriginal children in Perth. Lang. Educ. 19, 74–88. doi:
10.1080/09500780508668805
Simpson, J., and Wigglesworth, G. (2008). Children’s Language and Multilingualism: Indigenous Language use at Home and School. London: Continuum
International Press.
Singer, R., and Harris, S. (forthcoming). What practices and ideologies support
small-scale multilingualism? A case study of unexpected language survival in
an Australian Indigenous community. J. Socioling.
Slobin, D. (eds.). (1997). The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, Vol. 4.
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Smith, J., Durham, M., and Fortune, L. (2007). Community, caregiver and child in
the acquisition of variation in a Scottish dialect. Lang. Var. Change 19, 63–99.
doi: 10.1017/S0954394507070044
Smith, J., Durham, M., and Richards, H. (2013). The social and linguistic in
the acquisition of sociolinguistic norms: caregivers, children, and variation.
Linguistics 51, 285–324. doi: 10.1515/ling-2013-0012
Smith-Hefner, N. J. (1998). The linguistic socialization of Javanese children in two
communities. Anthropol. Linguist. 30, 166–198.
Snow, C. E. (1972). Mothers’ speech to children learning language. Child Dev. 43,
549–565. doi: 10.2307/1127555
Snow, C. E. (1977). “Mothers’ speech research: from input to interaction,” in Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition, eds C. E. Snow and C. A.
Ferguson (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press), 31–49.
Snow, C. E. (1995). “Issues in the study of input: fine-tuning, universality, individual and developmental differences, and necessary causes,” in Handbook
of Child Language, eds P. Fletcher and B. MacWhinney (Oxford: Blackwell),
180–193.
ten Thije, J. D., Rehbein, J., and Verschik, A. (2012). Receptive Multilingualism—
Introduction. Int. J. Biling. 16, 245–247. doi: 10.1177/1367006911426468
ten Thije, J. D., and Zeevaert, L. (eds.). (2007). Receptive Multilingualism: Linguistic Analyses, Language Policies and Didactic Concepts. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Turpin, M., Demuth, K., and Campbell, A. N. (2014). “Phonological aspects
of Arandic baby talk,” in Language Description Informed by Theory, eds R.
Pensalfini, M. Turpin, and D. Guillemin (Amsterdam: John Benjamins), 49–80.
Vosoughi, S. (2010). Interactions of Caregiver Speech and Early Word Learning in the Speechome Corpus: Computational Explorations. Cambridge, MA.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology MSc thesis.
Wigglesworth, G., and Simpson, J. (2008). “The language learning environment
of preschool children in Indigenous communities,” in Children’s Language and
Multilingualism: Indigenous Language use at Home and School, eds J. Simpson
and G. Wigglesworth (London: Continuum International Press), 13–29.
Wilkins, D. P., and Nash, D. (2008). “The European “discovery” of a multilingual
Australia: the linguistic and ethnographic successes of a failed expedition,” in
McWhinney, B. (2012). The Childes Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk, Vol. 1, 3rd
Edn. New York; East Sussex: Psychology Press.
Meakins, F. (2008). “Unravelling languages: multilingualism and language contact
in Kalkaringi,” in Children’s Language and Multilingualism: Indigenous Language use at Home and School, eds J. Simpson and G. Wigglesworth (London:
Continuum), 283–382.
Meakins, F. (2011). Case-marking in Contact: The Development and Function of
Case Morphology in Gurindji Kriol. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing
Company.
Morrison, B., and Disbray, S. (2008). “Warumungu children and language in Tennant Creek,” in Warra wiltaniappendi = Strengthening languages. Proceedings
of the Inaugural Indigenous Languages Conference (ILC) 2007 (Adelaide, SA:
Australia), 107–111.
Moses, K. (2009). How do Dinosaurs hug in the Kimberley? The Use of Questions by Aboriginal Caregivers and Children in a Walmajarri Community. Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Melbourne.
Moses, K., and Yallop, C. (2008). “Questions about questions,” in Children’s Language and Multilingualism: Indigenous Language use at Home and School, eds
J. Simpson and G. Wigglesworth (London: Continuum International Press),
30–55.
Naigles, L., and Hoff-Ginsberg, E. (1998). Why are some verbs learned before other
verbs? Effects of input frequency and structure on children’s early verb use. J.
Child Lang. 25, 95–120. doi: 10.1017/S0305000997003358
Nicoladis, E., and Genesee, F. (1997). Language development in preschool bilingual
children. J. Speech Lang. Pathol. Audiol. 21, 258–270.
O’Shannessy, C. (2005). Light warlpiri: a new language. Aust. J. Linguist. 25, 31–57.
doi: 10.1080/07268600500110472
O’Shannessy, C. (2011). “Young children’s social meaning making in a new mixed
language,” in Growing Up in Central Australia: New Anthropological Studies
of Aboriginal Childhood and Adolescence, ed U. Eickelkamp (New York, NY;
Oxford: Berghan Books), 131–155.
O’Shannessy, C. (2012). The role of code-switched input to children in the
origin of a new mixed language. Linguistics 50, 305–340. doi: 10.1515/ling2012-0011
Ochs, E., and Schieffelin, B. B. (1994). “Language acquisition and socialization:
three developmental stories and their implications,” in Language, Culture and
Society: A Book of Readings, 2nd Edn., ed B. G. Blount (Prospect Heights, IL:
Waveland Press Inc.), 470–512.
O’Shannessy, C. (2004). The Monster Stories: A Set of Picture Books to Elicit
Overt Transitive Subjects in Oral Texts. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics.
O’Shannessy, C. (2013). The role of multiple sources in the formation of an innovative auxiliary category in Light Warlpiri, a new Australian mixed language.
Language 89, 328–354. doi: 10.1353/lan.2013.0025
Pan, B. A., Rowe, M. L., Singer, J. D., and Snow, C. E. (2005). Maternal correlates
of growth in toddler vocabulary production in low-income families. Child Dev.
76, 763–782. doi: 10.1111/1467-8624.00498-i1
Paradis, J., and Genesee, F. (1996). Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children:
autonomous or interdependent? Stud. Second Lang. Acquis. 18, 1–25. doi:
10.1017/S0272263100014662
Patterson, J. L. (1998). Expressive vocabulary development and word combinations
of Spanish-English bilingual toddlers. Am. J. Speech Lang. Pathol. 7, 46–56. doi:
10.1044/1058-0360.0704.46
Patterson, J. L., and Pearson, B. Z. (2004). “Bilingual lexical development: influences, contexts and processes,” in Bilingual Language Development and Disorders in Spanish-English Speakers, ed B. A. Goldstein (Baltimore: Brookes),
77–104.
Paugh, A. L. (2005). Multilingual play: children’s code-switching, role
play, and agency in Dominica, West Indies. Lang. Soc. 34, 63–86. doi:
10.1017/S0047404505050037
Pearson, B. Z., and Fernandez, S. C. (1994). Patterns of interaction in the lexical
development in two languages of bilingual infants. Lang. Learn. 44, 617–653.
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-1770.1994.tb00633.x
Pearson, B. Z., Fernandez, S. C., and Oller, D. K. (1993). Lexical development in
bilingual infants and toddlers: comparison to monolingual norms. Lang. Learn.
43, 93–120. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-1770.1993.tb00174.x
Philips, J. R. (1973). Syntax and vocabulary of mothers’ speech to young children:
age and sex comparisons. Child Dev. 44, 182–185. doi: 10.2307/1127699
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
16
April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 514
Vaughan et al.
Child-caregiver interaction in Indigenous Australia
The History of Research on Australian Aboriginal languages, ed W. McGregor
(Canberra, ACT: Pacific Linguistics), 485–507.
Copyright © 2015 Vaughan, Wigglesworth, Loakes, Disbray and Moses. This is an
open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted,
provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use,
distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be
construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
17
April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 514