ALS 2010 Annual Conference Programme - Australian Linguistic ...

Disbray (2)
Samantha Disbray (Northern Territory Department of Education and Training,
University of Melbourne)
samantha.disbray@nt.gov.au
More than one way to catch a frog: Introducing new referents in
children’s narrative in an Indigenous contact language
The study presented in this paper focuses on reference from a developmental perspective.
It was carried out among speakers of an English-based Creole variety,
Wumpurrarni English, spoken in the Tennant Creek region of the NT. Children’s developing
ability to manage reference to characters in discourse, i.e to introduce,
maintain and switch reference, is a later acquired skill (Berman and Slobin 1994;
Hickmann 2003). The participants in the current study are children aged between
five and thirteen years of age.
The findings reveal age-related patterns regarding children’s developing ability to
manage reference, and the strategies that children engage to create a cohesive
stretch of discourse, bearing out developmental findings in other languages. In
addition, this study details linguistic means and strategies available in Wumpurrarni
English to manage reference. However, as some children in the study choose to
style-shift and narrate in Standard Australian English, the study also reveals some
interesting findings about children’s perceptions of Standard English, providing a
window into the additional demands that speaking this variety places on children,
and highlighting differences between Wumpurrarni English and Standard
Australian English.
References
Berman R. and Slobin D. (eds) 1994 Relating Events in Narrative: A cross- linguistic developmental study. Hillside, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Hickmann M. 2003 Children’s Discourse: Person, Space and Time across Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press