📋 Tender Overview
Grant agreement ID: 101222163
EC signature date
21 October 2026
Start date
1 November 2026
End date
31 October 2031
Objective
PNGLang will deliver the first comprehensive investigation of the cognitive and child developmental effects of parental use of a young creole language instead of local Indigenous languages. Papua New Guinea (PNG), home to more languages than any other nation, saw an unprecedented drop in Indigenous language fluency over the last generation, as more PNG parents chose to speak the English-based creole Tok Pisin to their children, over Indigenous languages. Because Tok Pisin has recently developed from Pidgin English into a creole, it still has a limited vocabulary, with general meanings—especially in comparison to the rich, specific vocabularies of Indigenous PNG languages. Psycholinguistic research elsewhere has shown that lexical specificity and richness facilitate learning, memory and attention. Thus, parental use of Tok Pisin instead of an Indigenous PNG language could impact children’s linguistic development, and the ways that they learn, remember, and attend to the world around them.
PNGLang innovates by capturing the psycholinguistic impact on children and young adults of rural PNG parents’ shift toward Tok Pisin. Using day-long recordings, longitudinal assessments, and online processing experiments, PNGLang will pinpoint: a) Differences in the quality of adult speech to children in Tok Pisin vs. Indigenous languages, b) The relationship between linguistic input quality and child developmental outcomes in PNG, and c) Effects of structural differences between Tok Pisin and Indigenous languages on cognitive processes among children and young adults. The PI’s expertise in linguistic typology, language acquisition, and field-based experimentation enables PNGLang’s success.
PNGLang will significantly expand knowledge and catalyse new fields of inquiry joining psycholinguistics with language endangerment. Results will provide parents, educators and policymakers with key information to support the linguistic and cognitive development of Indigenous children.
