jo.hickey-hall Among the vast number of things children need to learn about language is how to appropriately refer to other people. One way to do this is to use kinship terms—words like ‘great-grandmother’, ‘brother-in-law’, or ‘sister’. The particular set of kinterms a child needs to know will obviously depend on the languages they’re learning to speak. … Read more
Here at excd.lab we recently launched our Grandparent Naming Survey. It’s being run by Jo Hickey-Hall, Research Support Assistant, as part of the Usage subproject for VariKin. VariKin-Usage specifically investigates how people use kinship language by using corpus linguistics, surveys, and interviews to quantify patterns of usage in spoken and written language. How frequently are kinship … Read more
Each week, the excd lab take turns to offer journal articles for discussion, or even present our own research. In 2019 Journal Club members enjoyed the company of regular guests Dr Dan Smith, Dr Kit Opie, Dr Catherine Sheard (Biology) and undergrad, Jasmine Calladine. We also welcomed new guests: Philosophy PhD students Shaun Stanley and Arsham Nejad Kourki, visiting Professor Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Anthropology PhD student Arif Jamal and Biology PhD … Read more
This summer I worked with Dr Alice Mitchell researching how person reference terms are used in child-directed speech in English. To do this we made use of the CHILDES database (example pictured below), a collection of transcriptions of children’s speech. Instances of person reference were recorded and coded into five categories, kin terms, kin terms … Read more