Meet the Team

Josua Dahmen is a Senior Research Officer at the Australian National University, Canberra. Josh uses an interactional-linguistic approach to study language structures in ordinary conversation. His research interests include multimodal communication, language socialisation, language contact and language shift. He also has a special interest in the documentation and description of endangered languages and has been working in collaboration with the Jaru community in Western Australia. In the BLS project Josh supports the research endeavors by the Ku Waru and French teams, and he contributes to the preparation and coding of multimodal data for cross-cultural and cross-linguistic comparison.

Lucy Davidson is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests centre on the development of children’s communicative competence, with a particular focus on children’s peer interactions. Since 2013 she has worked with families in the remote Aboriginal community of Wadeye who speak the Australian language, Murrinhpatha. She has also spent time working with Pitjantjatjara-speaking families in Pipalyatjara in South Australia. In the BLS project Lucy will continue working with Murrinhpatha-speaking children and caregivers to explore multimodal aspects of language development and socialisation.

Eleanor Jorgensen

University of Melbourne
Research Assistant

Eleanor Jorgensen is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne investigating the expression of time in Hawai`i Sign Language. Her previous work has focused on multimodal event expression and documentation of Australian Indigenous alternate sign languages. As a research assistant at the Melbourne node of the Body, Language and Socialisation project, she is currently working with Jennifer Green and Lucy Davidson on multimodal directives in Murrinhpatha caregiver-child interactions.

Prof Aliyah Morgenstern

Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle
Partner Investigator

Aliyah Morgenstern majored in English studies and linguistics at Ecole Normale Supérieure Fontenay-St Cloud in France. She is currently a full Professor at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Vice-rector for European affairs and president of the Research Ethics Committee. Her research is focused on multimodal interaction and language socialization. She has supervised over a dozen funded national and international projects and published over 150 monographs, edited volumes and papers using socio-pragmatic, constructionist and functionalist perspectives with multimodal approaches to spontaneous longitudinal data. She is the French Partner Investigator in the BSL Project and works on both longitudinal and dinner data of families using English, French, and French sign language.

Lourdes de León is Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social in Mexico. Most of her research focuses on community learning, first language acquisition, and language socialization of the Mayan language Tzotzi, encompassing all stages of life. She conducts field research among the Tzotzil Mayan people in the highlands of Chiapas and other indigenous regions of Mexico. In the BLS project, she will investigate multimodal aspects of language socialisation based on ordinary interactions involving Tzotzil children.

Prof John Haviland

University of California, San Diego
Partner Investigator

John Haviland, UCSD Anthropology, studies the social life of languages including Tzotzil (Mayan), Paman languages in Australia, and a first generation sign language in Chiapas.  His publications include several grammatical sketches, and range over topics from gossip in Zinacantán, the demise of a language (and its last speaker) in Queensland, and the (dis)honorifics of avoidance languages, to gesture, and the emergence of grammar and language ideology. His research in this project investigates coexpressive modalities in the emerging sociolinguistic skills of young children who speak Tzotzil, sometimes while mastering an emerging sign language in their household, and those of a pair of twin children growing up trilingually (in English, Italian, and Spanish) over the first 4 years of their lives.

A/Prof Tamar Kremer-Sadlik

University of California, Los Angeles
Informal Participant

Tamar Kremer-Sadlik researches the dynamics of family life, focusing on how socio-cultural beliefs shape family relationships and everyday routines. Her work explores the interplay between local cultural perspectives on family, work, childhood, parenting, and ethics, and how these influence the daily experiences of family members. By drawing on an interdisciplinary approach, including linguistic and psychological anthropology, sociology, and psychology, she investigates the impact of cultural norms and preferences embedded in institutional policies and public discourse on child-rearing, time allocation, social engagement, and family decision-making. In this project, she will investigate food-sharing practices and interaction during family dinners.

Marjorie Harness Goodwin is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Much of her research focuses on the lived and embodied practices through which human beings construct their social, cultural and cognitive worlds. She investigates how children in peer groups across various US settings and social classes elaborate and dispute their notions of moral behavior as they play together on the street and on the playground, looking at gossip, games, and forms of social exclusion. Her work with middle class American families investigates how family members use touch, gesture, and prosody in conjunction with talk to establish, maintain, and negotiate intimate social relationships, orchestrate activities through directives, and engage in playful explorations of the world.

Sara Ciesielski completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne, focusing on how children in the Solu-Khumbu region of Nepal learn the Sherpa language and culture. Her child-centered approach provides an account of children’s development of culture through language that is sensitive to children’s individual differences and culturally shaped patterns of interaction. In the BLS project, she will investigate multimodal aspects of Sherpa language socialisation: the ways that body position, movement, and gesture flow into directives from caregivers to children and from children to caregivers.