PROGRAM

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Invited presentations

Dr. Nala Lee: Sociolinguistics and the endangerment of Baba Malay    

Baba Malay is a contact language that emerged through early intermarriages between indigenous women in the Malay Peninsula and Chinese traders in the region. Spoken by the descendants of these intermarriages, Baba Malay has become critically endangered. This talk describes a series of three sociolinguistics studies that have been carried out in conjunction with a language documentation project. Through the use of perception tasks such as the matched guise experiment and by examining production data, the talk highlights what sociolinguistics brings to the study of an endangered language, as well as how an endangered language has things to teach us about sociolinguistics. 

Dr. Aine Ito: Prediction and sentence comprehension in a non-native language

People process language at an incredibly fast speed. A speaker can easily produce several words per second, while a listener must decode the meaning of each word and integrate the meaning into the context at roughly the same speed. Native language (L1) speakers usually do this efficiently, and one way they achieve this efficiency is by predicting upcoming language. In contrast, non-native language (L2) comprehension is less efficient compared to L1 comprehension. A possible reason for less efficient L2 comprehension is that L2 speakers tend to predict to a lesser extent than L1 speakers. In this talk, I will present studies on prediction in L1 and L2 and discuss major accounts for reduced prediction in L2. I will then present a recent study exploring the possibility of using prediction as a helping hand for facilitating real-time comprehension in L2 speakers.

Dr. Alexander Smith: Community-Engaged Research and Documentation of Lebo' Vo' Kenyah

Lebo’ Vo’ Kenyah is a highly divergent member of the Kenyah subgroup of languages, spoken in Sarawak, Malaysia. Lebo’ Vo’ is an under-documented and endangered language, but has been the subject of recent targeted study and documentation through student, community, and researcher led research. This research has followed several less conventional methods that have resulted in a large and growing corpus of archived data during a time when traditional field work was difficult or impossible. That corpus includes 40 hours of fully transcribed, time-aligned, and accessible recordings of Lebo’ Vo’ in multiple non-proprietary formats (Smith and Laing 2022), and will soon be augmented with 40 to 50 additional hours with similar levels of analysis.   

In this presentation, I will discuss several aspects of the Lebo’ Vo’ Kenyah project and the goals of emphasizing community-engagement through the project (Czayakowa-Higgins 2009, Dobrin & Schwartz, Leonard & Haynes 2010) These include 1) the long-term nature of this research, building collaborative relationships with communities through commitment beyond first sessions, 2) Community training of speaker-scholars for the independent collection and annotation of data, 3) Streamlining and automation of data management and archiving protocols, intended to reduce the bottleneck in data gathering and allow for greater involvement in archiving from students and community members. I then discuss current stages of the research and output from previous efforts and future plans. This will include a short description of Kenyah, informed by data gathered in the past two years.  

Experiences from the Lebo’ Vo’ Kenyah project may inform more efficient approaches to data management that can be implemented in future projects.  

Czaykowska-Higgins, Ewa. 2009. Research Models, Community Engagement, and Linguistic Fieldwork: Reflections on Working within Canadian Indigenous Communities. Language Documentation & Conservation 3(1): 182-215. 

Dobrin, Lise M. and Saul Schwartz. 2016. Collaboration or Participant Observation? Rethinking Models of ‘Linguistic Social Work. Language Documentation & Conservation. 10:253-277 

Leonard, Wesley Y. & Erin Haynes. 2010. Making “collaboration” collaborative: An examination of perspectives that frame linguistic field research. Language Documentation & Conservation 4. 268–293. 

Smith, Alexander D. and Louise Ping Laing. 2022. Kenyah Lebo’ Vo’, Long Tikan Elicitations. Elicitation sessions on the Lebo’ Vo’, Long Tikan variety of Kenyah. https://hdl.handle.net/10125/10235