Romania-born Kiwi linguist Dr Andreea Calude just received a Marsden Fund grant.
Romania-born Kiwi linguist Dr Andreea Calude just received a Marsden Fund grant.
University of Waikato data linguist Dr Andreea Calude has received a Marsden Fund grant to study children’s associations with certain words and when they begin to understand the different nuances of words.
The project will not only answer those questions, but also provide tangible assets that educators, businesses and whānau can use.
Calude says from a certain age, children learn more than the simple attribution of meanings to words.
“They’ll also start to form associations with the people who use that word - who are they? Where do they come from? Are they a member of the local community or not? Are they trustworthy, friendly, funny, intelligent, and so on?
“All of that social information that gets layered on top of meaning, that’s what we want to study,” she says.
Calude’s team - which includes associate investigators Professor Hēmi Whaanga from Massey University, Dr Eline Zenner from KU Leuven and Dr Laura Rosseel from Vrije Universiteit Brussel - wants to know what children do with this social information, at what age that starts to develop, and what they’re learning about Māori words used in New Zealand English.
“We want to know when and to what extent children in mainstream schooling in Aotearoa New Zealand acquire prestige in relation to words - when do we begin to understand the social and cultural nuances of words we use every day, and in particular, words borrowed from Te Reo Māori?” Calude says.
For their study, they plan to interview 350 primary school pupils throughout the project.
Images used in the research will be similar to this. Image / Visual Evolution
“There is so much work to do [...] around making sure the questions we ask are right. The way we ask them, where we ask them and how we phrase them; all of those things need to be addressed.”
For the research, Calude will use images like the one above, some which represent words children know, and some those that are in the process of being acquired.
“I am just so delighted,” Calude says. “We have been extremely privileged to have had the support of two local primary schools already... Learning from this young generation of children, at a time of such tremendous change in our variety of English, is indeed very exciting.”
The Marsden Fund, managed by the Royal Society of New Zealand, supports excellence in science, engineering, maths, social sciences and the humanities in New Zealand by providing grants for investigator-initiated research.
Waikato University Associate Professor at Te Raupapa Waikato Management School and Te Kotahi Research Institute, Jason Mika, also received a Marsden grant of $360,000 for the project ‘Manahau: In search of the original Māori firm and its philosophy of management’.
