Marsden Fund grants for two linguistics academics
Two academics from Victoria University’s School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies have received Marsden Fund grants, totalling $880,000, for leading edge research projects.
Head of the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies Associate Professor John Macalister describes the grants that have been awarded to Professor Miriam Meyerhoff and Dr Sasha Calhoun as a remarkable achievement for the school.
Miriam has been awarded a standard grant for her project 'Rethinking language change in a super-diverse city'. She intends to use quantitative methods—including some innovative resources her team has developed—to explore how the increased diversity of Auckland reveals new processes and trajectories for language change.
"Cities today aren't like the cities sociolinguistics cut its teeth on; Auckland is a prime example of this. In parts of Auckland there is no ethnic majority and up to 50 percent of the population is under 15 years old.
"These demographics create situations that profoundly challenge widely-held principles about how language changes and who leads language change."
Sasha has been awarded a grant for her project titled 'Searching for a Shared World: The integration of prosody and word ordering in cross-linguistic speech perception'. This research will shed light on how listeners interpret different cues to focus on what is being heard, interpreted and understood. This is an area that is important but not currently well understood.
Sasha will undertake speech perception experiments using Samoan and English monolingual and bilingual speakers. This research will also deepen understanding of a major Polynesian language—Gagana Samoa—which is New Zealand's third-most spoken language.