Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language Melbourne showcase presentation

Niles Zhao

On May 13, the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL) held an executive meeting in Melbourne. Part of the meeting was an open session which showcased eight recent projects that SOLL researchers have been working on. CoEDL consists of a team of Australian and international scholars collaborating across the disciplines of linguistics, speech pathology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, bioinformatics and robotics. It investigates language as diverse, dynamic and evolving systems that interacts with human perceptual processes in intricate ways.

Dr. Hywel Stoakes and his presentation. Photo by John-Paul Hougaz

The session adopted a blended synchronous mode with five speakers presenting in-person and three speakers online. The first speaker was Dr. Debbie Loakes, who shared her recent project, Voice quality in Australian English. The project investigates the voice quality characteristics of L1 Aboriginal English speakers and mainstream Australian English speakers in two rural communities in Victoria. The second speaker, Dr. Hywel Stoakes, reported on his project that looks at the phonetics and automatic speech recognition of the languages of Efate in Vanuatu. Hywel developed a workflow to segment narrative speech data for the four languages spoken on Efate. The third speaker, Sophie Lewincamp, provided an update on Nyingarn, an online platform of digital text versions of early Australian Indigenous language manuscripts with images of the original documents. The fourth speaker, Dr. Ruth Singer, introduced the Decolonising Linguistics Study Group. The group has met six times so far since its inception in 2021 and has provided a space for indigenous linguists to share their voices, as well as to teach and learn about decolonisation.

Sasha Wilmoth and her presentation. Photo by John-Paul Hougaz

The fifth speaker, Dr. Bill Forshaw, presented his collaborative work on how research informed professional development for educators in Wadeye, Northern Territory.  The sixth presentation was given by Dr. Jonathan Moodie on negating verbs in Eastern Nilotic languages, which are spoken by more than three million people in East Africa. The seventh speaker, Sasha Wilmoth, documented the phonological change in contemporary Pitjantjatjara, as spoken at Pukatja in South Australia. The last speaker, Dr. John Mansfield, talked about the role of dialects in linguistic diversification by comparing more than 80 dialects across the globe.

This session highlights CoEDL’s latest cutting-edge and cross-disciplinary research. The University of Melbourne holds one of the four CoEDL nodes, where Professor Gillian Wigglesworth, Professor Janet Fletcher, Professor Rachel Nordlinger, and Associate Professor Nick Thieberger, as well as several postdoctoral research fellows, research assistants, PhD students and affiliates work on amazing projects that facilitate new development in language science.