The Project: Documenting Child Language
Our project documents child language among the Qaqet: the language that parents, adults and other children speak around and with young children, the language that young children themselves speak, and the cultural practices by which children are socialized into becoming competent speakers of the Qaqet language and responsible members of Qaqet society. Below you see some of our Qaqet colleagues engaged in different project activities.
At the heart of our project is a longitudinal corpus, which allows us insights into the linguistic development of the children. A number of Qaqet families regularly record their children on video each week for one hour, over a period of one year or more. They record them during their typical day-to-day activities – at home, in the bush or in the garden; interacting with adults and other children; playing and singing, eating food, chatting, relaxing or helping around the house and garden. In some cases, we have supplemented the natural recordings with staged recordings, where children play with books, toys and other materials that we provided.
Some families come from the remote village of Raunsepna, where children grow up largely monolingually. And others come from the accessible village of Kamanakam, where children grow up multilingually, acquiring Qaqet and Tok Pisin at the same time. This setup allows us to compare monolingual and multilingual acquisition.
Data from the project is archived with two archives:
- Data collected between 2011 and 2014 is archived with the Endangered Languages Archive
- Data collected since 2014 is archived in Cologne's Data Center for the Humanities.
Our project started in 2014 with generous funding from the Volkswagen Foundation’s Lichtenberg program. It builds on a pilot project from 2013 where we explored the feasibility of documenting child language, Language socialisation and the transmission of Qaqet Baining (Papua New Guinea): Towards a documentation project, funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme. And it builds on our earlier research from 2011 to 2014 on the adult language, Semantic categories: Exploring the history of the Baining languages of Island Melanesia, funded by the Australian Research Council. Our research in Papua New Guinea is supported by the National Research Institute of Papua New Guinea.