Caroline Hendy's TPR outlines her vision to produce the first documentation and analysis of children’s acquisition of Wiru, an under-documented Papuan language spoken by 15,000–40,000 people in PNG.
This project aims to produce the first documentation and analysis of children’s acquisition of Wiru, an under-documented Papuan language spoken by some 15,000–40,000 people in Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea.
Working with Wiru families, I will develop an ‘acquisition sketch’ (Defina et al. 2023a,b), describing key features of Wiru as used by, with, and around children. This will contribute to addressing the large gap in cross-linguistic research on children's language development (Kidd & Garcia 2022) and form the basis for community-centred outputs.
In this talk, I will outline the overall project and discuss promising areas for in-depth study, including the multilingual environment in which children acquire Wiru and the language’s complex clausal structures.
