Optimal Categorisation

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Optimal Categorisation

Current Project

Optimal Categorisation: the origin and nature of gender from a psycholinguistic perspective.

Grammatical gender is perplexing concept that has raised an abundance of questions around its origin, impact and the classification of entities in various languages. With the primary question being: Why are there so many different categorisation systems?

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With the objective to investigate the formation and development of gender in language and its interplay with cognition, six interconnected languages have been selected with distinctive possessive classifier systems. The sample of Oceanic languages encompass those spoken in Vanuatu and New Caledonia.

To further comprehend the nature and origin of grammatical gender six psycholinguistic experiments have been developed. These experiments investigate classifier systems within the six oceanic languages, collecting data to investigate our hypotheses.

Using our data, with the support of local stakeholders, we are creating vital vernacular literacy materials to help support these endangered languages. We are also interacting with the public to share, explain, and teach about these remarkable varieties of nominal categorisation.

Our team has published several papers as a result of our research, with other papers being written and reviewed.

Our researchers have given a number of talks as part of our outreach efforts to share the project findings.

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Languages are VERY different

Psychologists are aware of the dangers of using data from WEIRD societies (Western, Educated,Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic: Henrich, Heine & Norenzayan 2010). Comparable issues involving language were highlighted by Dahl (2015), who urges us to be wary of generalizing from LOL languages (Literate, Official, and with Lots of users). Given that rather many psychologists work with English (a LOL language), we start here, and examine English within the rich diversity of the world’s languages. We consider aspects of both its external situation and its internal structure. We conclude that English is highly atypical as a natural language. This is clearly a problem. On the other hand, the diversity of human languages brings with it exciting opportunities for psychologists as well as for linguists. We report on research which takes diversity (and non-LOL languages) as the starting point. It involves psycholinguistic work on Oceanic languages spoken in Vanuatu and New Caledonia, investigating categorization systems and the origin of gender.

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