You are invited to CHL PhD Candidate Caroline Hendy's Mid Term Review
Time: 10am to 11am AEDT
Date: Friday, 28 March 2025
Speaker: Caroline Hendy, CHL PhD Candidate
Venue: Engma Room 3.165,
HC Coombs Building and Online via Zoom
Meeting ID: 846 6145 5267
Meeting Passcode: 400501
This presentation focuses on child-directed repetition prompts, or ‘prompting routines’ (Demuth, 1986), in Ku Waru, a regional variety of Mbo Ung (Trans-New Guinea) spoken by approximately 1,000 people in Papua New Guinea’s Western Highlands Province (Merlan & Rumsey, 1991).
Drawing on a corpus of recordings collected between 2013 and 2016 by Alan Rumsey and Francesca Merlan, this work contributes to a larger project developing an ‘acquisition sketch’ (Defina et al., 2023a, 2023b) of Ku Waru as it is used by, with, and around children.
Caroline will present a preliminary description and analysis of prompting routines in interactions between adults and five children aged two to four years. In these routines, an adult says something—often framed by the imperative nya ‘say’—which the child is expected to repeat. Such prompts serve multiple socialisation functions, including linguistic instruction, social guidance, self- and other-concept development, humour, and face-saving information seeking. The ways in which caregivers coordinate these routines with each other will be discussed, as well as how adults repair misunderstandings when children misinterpret prompts.
Children also have agency in these interactions, and this will be explored through their choice to accept, not accept, or to outright reject a given prompt. These findings illustrate how Ku Waru-speaking adults use prompting routines to guide children’s entry into both their linguistic community and broader socio-cultural norms.
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