How do children learn languages? How do they learn to understand the intentions and perspectives of other people, and coordinate their own with them? How do they become socialized into particular ways of life? How do those ways of life get reproduced and transformed in everyday human interaction?
All of these questions have been extensively studied, from many different viewpoints. What is special – maybe even unique – about this project is the way we bring the four questions together and try to show how our answers to each can be improved by studying all of them in relation to each other.
The research has been carried out in the Ku Waru region, in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, where children are still growing up speaking the local Papuan language Ku Waru as their mother tongue. The main data for our study are transcribed video recordings of five Ku Waru children between two and five years of age, interacting with their parents and others. Examples of the kinds of findings that our transdisciplinary perspective has enabled are the following:
As elsewhere in New Guinea, one of the main ways in which Ku Waru children learn to differentiate, share and exchange perspectives with others is through being prompted by adults and older children to engage in set-piece interactional routines, including commands that the children are prompted to address to others (‘Tell your sister not to cry’, ‘Let’s go up to the men’s house’ etc.).
It is partly though such prompts that Ku Waru children become socialized into particular ways of acting, thinking and feeling, and learn to position themselves in relation to others.
The socialization process both reproduces and partially transforms the sociocultural order in which it takes place.
As with our findings concerning language acquisition per se, all of the above are broadly comparable to what goes on elsewhere the world, but with interesting local specificities that help us to enrich the understanding of language and human sociality in general.