Research projects
Explore a selection of recent Australian Research Council (ARC) and other research projects undertaken by academics in the School of Languages and Linguistics.
Literature, cinema, gender, food and cross-cultural studies
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Popular Music and Resistance in Latin America
Dr Mara Favoretto examines the lyrics and visual images of key popular music genres and highlights their interactions with their social, political and economic contexts.
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Transcultural trajectories in Italian Theatre
This project studies how the collective re-writing and mise en scène of plays by theatre companies and migrants facilitate inclusion and enhance new forms of belonging.
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Prose Poetry and the Visual Arts
In an interdisciplinary fashion, Dr Bertrand Bourgeois’ current research explores the interaction between prose poetry and the visual arts in 19th and 20th century French literature and culture.
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Images of the Nation in Spanish and Catalan Cinema
The notion of ‘country-image’ is crucial in post-identity studies of national cultures. Professor Alfredo Martinez-Exposito's project seeks to further develop this concept in order to explore an alternative methodology for the study of the cultural roots of contemporary separatism.
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Community nutrition and education in a Havana urban farm
A new grant from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) is supporting community engagement in Cuba
Language dynamics, identity and social diversity
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1 Potato, 2 Wotatoes, 3 Otatoes: Lexical Access In Australian Languages
This project aims to investigate how listeners use cues from the way speech sounds are produced to break the speech stream into individual, recognisable words.
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The Daly Languages project
From 1980 until the mid-1990s, Dr Ian Green conducted linguistic fieldwork in the Daly region in the Northern Territory. The Daly Languages project has made this incredible collection available to the families and communities of the people Green worked with.
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A sociophonetic study of Aboriginal English
This project looks at speech production and perception by Aboriginal people in Warrnambool (and surrounds) and now moving to Albury-Wodonga and Mildura (and surrounds).
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The sounds of Anindilyakwa
The Anindilyakwa language, spoken on Groote Eylandt of the eastern coast of Arnhem Land, has unique sound patterns that have caused considerable disagreement among linguists.
Language analysis, teaching and testing
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Examining the relevance of the Pearson Test of English to nursing communication
This study aims to examine the relevance of the test tasks in a large-scale language test to the work domain of internationally-qualified nurses in Australia.
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General English Proficiency Test
This study aims to link the General English Proficiency Test writing subtest (Part 1) to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) and explore the challenges in linking translation tasks to the CEFR levels
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Are super-complex words represented like sentences in speakers’ minds?
By examining speakers’ knowledge of super-complex words in the remote Australian language Wubuy, this project seeks to challenge our views on the concept of what a ‘word’ is and thereby the foundations of language description and speech processing.
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British Council Aptis test
This study explores the features of writing produced at the highest score levels on the Aptis Advanced writing test to inform rating scale design.
Indigenous languages of Australia and the region
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Digital Daisy Bates
In collaboration with the National Library of Australia (NLA), this project has made accessible this extremely valuable collection of several hundred wordlists of Australian languages, originally recorded by Daisy Bates in the early 1900s.
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Darwin prison Indigenous languages program
Speakers of Indigenous languages are tragically over-represented in Australian prisons, including Darwin prison where almost 90% of inmates are Indigenous and around 50% speak an Indigenous language.
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Learning Pitjantjatjara: A longitudinal study of how children learn Pitjantjatjara
This research project looks at the linguistic development of young Indigenous children as they grow up learning the traditional Australian language Pitjantjatjara as their mother tongue.
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Learning to tell a narrative in Murrinhpatha
This project investigates the stories told by children who speak the traditional Australian language Murrinhpatha as their first language. Murrinhpatha is a polysynthetic language, spoken in the remote Aboriginal community of Wadeye, NT.