Understanding Learning Mechanisms and Language Acquisition through Intergenerational Conversations in Southwestern Ojibwe, a Native American language

Grassroots Indigenous Multimedia, Hayward WI

Investigators

Abstract

Historically, the indigenous languages of the United States were acquired in homes and everyday life through intergenerational interactions between children, parents, grandparents and community members. However, the interruption of this naturalistic acquisition and intergenerational transmission means that today, many Native languages are being acquired in schools or other environments, rather than the home. The Native American Languages Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1990, enacted into policy the recognition of the unique status and importance of Native American languages. This project will use the language sciences and the science of learning to analyze and understand the linguistic patterns and learning processes of children acquiring a Native language in these other contexts. Using forest walks as a way to analyze points of view, this project will pair together dyads of fluent elders with children learners. Theories of second language acquisition draw on learners of English and other European languages, but there is very little learning data from Native American languages, which often have very rich grammar in areas like morphology and animacy. This study will analyze potential differences in perspective that are encoded in communicative practices, focusing on communicative practices in indigenous languages. Scientists from the fields of linguistics, cognition, education and learning science will collaborate on this interdisciplinary project. Documentary linguistics methods will create an annotated multimedia corpus, available to learning scientists for investigation following similar studies previously conducted in English. Broader impacts include a publicly available corpus of unique and valuable language acquisition data, the training of indigenous scholars (who are underrepresented in the language sciences), support for language revitalization and the potential positive impact on intergenerational transmission of a Native American language. Southwestern Ojibwe, an endangered Algonquian language, has extraordinarily complex polysynthetic constructions, an area of grammar underdocumented in acquisition. Following findings that suggest the study of everyday language is essential for understanding categories and worldview, this study is the first known attempt to document intergenerational language in Ojibwe, thereby contributing to a more complete record of the language. By recording adult-child interaction, the project augments the documentation of fluent elders, while also creating data sets relevant to second language acquisition, the science of learning and the cognitive sciences. This project will adopt methodologies from learning science in English that have contributed to scientific knowledge of the ways Native American elders and children understand the natural world. Although the data collection and process is similar, this project will crucially use medium of communication as Ojibwe rather than English. The resulting corpus of linguistic data and analyses will contribute to the ongoing effort to understand cross-cultural differences in language socialization and in an understanding of the natural world.