Confirmed Plenary Speakers

Abstract

The year 2027 marks the mid-point of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages and a moment in the new era of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) when we might expect multilingual large language models (LLMs) to enhance the future prospects of Australia’s Aboriginal languages. The presumed opportunity is for people to reclaim their ancestral languages with the support of chatbots that have been trained on all available content. However, LLMs perform poorly on Indigenous languages, not just because of the dearth of training data, but because oral cultures are out of view of LLMs trained on monolingual text collections. What, then, does cultural survival look like in the GenAI era? We seek nuanced answers to this question that fall between the extremes of blind acceptance and outright rejection. Key themes include: (1) relationality, where knowledge is embedded in the land and transmitted at the right time and right place to the right people, not the free-for-all assumed by GenAI; (2) hybridisation, where communicative practices may be Indigenous-western hybrids, not the pure forms found in documentary records; and (3) embodiment, where language serves local participation, and is not the information-seeking activity commonly assumed by designers of GenAI. This presentation will draw on experiences arising in collaborations with First Nations speech communities and language centres in the north and west of Australia, and shared with permission.

Ian Gumbula is a Yolŋu elder and PhD student, collaborating with Steven Bird at Charles Darwin University, supported by an ARC project "Investing in Aboriginal Languages". Ian is from the Daywurrwurr Gupapuyŋu clan from Northeast Arnhem Land. Ian is a qualified teacher and has worked extensively in education, youth work, community governance, and intercultural facilitation.

Steven Bird studies language vitality and Indigenous agency in shaping programs designed to keep languages strong. Steven is past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics, co-founder of the Open Language Archives Community, lead developer of the Natural Language Toolkit, producer at LanguageParties.org, and has held academic positions at U Edinburgh, Penn, Berkeley, Melbourne, and CDU.

Abstract

Abstract for Keynote "Introducing Anthrophonetics" coming soon...

Norma C. Mendoza-Denton is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she founded and directs the Language, Electronic Gaming, and Interactional Technologies Lab. Trained in linguistics at Stanford University, she works in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and the study of race, gender, and media. Her research focuses on language, identity, and power, with particular attention to Latina/o youth, political discourse, and digital culture. She is the author of Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth Gangs and co-editor of Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies. She has also served as Associate Dean in UCLA’s Graduate Division and as President of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology within the American Anthropological Association. She is currently writing a textbook on Multimodal Ethnographies.

Abstract

Lexical tone is an important phonological feature of many languages around the world, but the acquisition of lexical tone by children is much less well understood than the acquisition of consonants and vowels. Earlier studies on Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese show that children produce few tone errors by age two, well ahead of their acquisition of segments. Nevertheless, recent studies using more rigorous methods have found that tone acquisition is more protracted than previously thought. In addition, many studies have demonstrated cross-linguistic influence in the bilingual acquisition of segments, but little is known about the acquisition of lexical tone in various bilingual contexts. Tone sandhi is a robust feature of many Chinese dialects, involving higher-order, sometimes very complex, obligatory phonological alternations of lexical tone. However, children’s acquisition of complex tone sandhi remains largely unexplored. This talk will address these important issues by discussing Cantonese lexical tone acquisition in monolingual and bilingual contexts, as well as children’s acquisition of both simple and complex tone sandhi patterns in several Chinese dialects. The findings illustrate the multifaceted nature of lexical tone acquisition.

Peggy Mok is a Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, and Associate Dean (Student Affairs) at the Faculty of Arts, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She obtained her MPhil and PhD in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge. She is currently an Associate Editor of JASA Express Letters and Phonetica. She has diverse interests in phonetics, incorporating articulatory, acoustic and psycholinguistic perspectives in cross-linguistic investigations of speech production and perception. Speech acquisition in different contexts is an important theme in her research. Her projects have been supported by grants from the General Research Fund by the Research Grants Council in Hong Kong. She is also awarded the Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship Scheme in 2025/26.