Language acquisition of Murrinhpatha (LAMP) (2011-2015)
From little things, big things grow: How children learn a morphologically complex Australian indigenous language
Professor Rachel Nordlinger, Dr Barbara Kelly, Professor Gillian Wigglesworth and Dr Joe Blythe
Language acquisition of Murrinhpatha: this project provided a detailed study of the acquisition of Murrinhpatha (Wadeye, NT), based on the language of Murrinhpatha speaking children from 2-6 years. Although much is known about how children acquire languages such as English, there is very little research that examines how children acquire a complex polysynthetic language like Murrinhpatha. The findings from this project had implications for the understanding of how acquisition processes are created through linguistic complexity, cognitive constraints and social interaction and how these processes differ across children acquiring radically different language types.