This is a trial project looking at elderly people's language in Papua New Guinea. Using over a decade of existing recordings, we plan to measure sounds in a language with a special kind of grammar often found in PNG, clause chains, and assess if elderly people maintain intonation like their younger productions. This is significant because elderly European people have been studied and show diminishing ability to change their vocal intonations. Clause chains require this intonation change to have understandable meaning, so elderly people who use clause chains may stave off these consequences of aging.
The goal of this project is not to create an experimental paradigm that pits clause-chain language speakers vs. those without. Rather, it is to assess whether this known element of aging is less likely to be experienced by clause-chain language speakers than other aging effects. If so, it is yet another lesson from our elders and a significant benefit to maintaining linguistic repertoires.

Assoc Prof Danielle Barth is a corpus linguist in CHL at CAP. Corpus linguistics is the analysis of many instances of language use to better understand people and their complexities. She has been working with a language community in Matukar, Papua New Guinea for over a decade. Her areas of research expertise are quantitative corpus linguistics, typology and linguistic variation. She is a co-developer of the large multilingual corpus SCOPIC and co-author of the foundational textbook Understanding Corpus Linguistics. She loves travel, embroidery and coffee.