Researchers Visit Micronesia and the Maldives to Study the Use of Language

Does the kind of environment you live in determine how you talk about physical space?

That's the question Faculty of Education and Arts linguist Dr Bill Palmer is exploring as part of a joint research collaboration between The University of Newcastle and Monash University.

Funded by the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects scheme, the project involves two PhD students who will spend 6 months on atolls in the Marshall Islands in Micronesia and the Maldives to study the way people talk about physical space.

Dr Palmer said that different communities conceptualise space in different ways.

"It's to do with the nature/nurture debate. People used to think that the way humans talked about space was a nature thing, something inbuilt and based on our own bodies. But then research showed that it varies surprisingly between communities, suggesting it's more a nurture or learned thing. But my study goes back to the nature side a bit more. My theory is that our environment affects the way we think and speak about space, and that people respond to their environments in predictable and universal ways."

"We chose to study atoll inhabitants as they live in a particularly unusual environment, typically with a central lagoon surrounded by a narrow strip of land. On most atolls you can see both the lagoon and the ocean from almost anywhere which has specific consequences on the way people talk about their location and give directions," said Dr Palmer.

"This project looks at the theory that there is a relationship between the environment and the way people think and talk about the space they live in."

In order to test the theory, Linguistics PhD student Johathan Schlossberg and his Monash counterpart Jonathon Lum have developed a video game that will be used by pairs of study participants. One participant will be asked to give directions to the other who will guide a video game character through a computer generated atoll environment. This allows the observer to note the language used by the participants when giving directions.

"This is a newly devised methodology that will allow us to collect and compare data from two environments with physical similarities with totally different languages - atolls in the Maldives and the Marshall Islands," said Dr Palmer.

"We will also compare the data from the Marshall Islands with data we will collect by studying a how a community of Marshallese speakers living in Arkansas in the USA talk about their very different physical environment."

Before the development of the computer game, researchers used more bird's-eye view methods like a small-scale town model to study how participants gave directions.

"This video game will immerse the participants in the test environment and give us much more accurate data, and we expect other researchers will also be able to use it in the future."