5 things to know about how families support children’s language development: Evidence base for the poster information

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Ways of interacting in families in central Australia

O’Shannessy, Carmel, Jennifer Green, Vanessa Davis, Jessie Bartlett, Alice Nelson, Ashleigh Jones, and Denise Foster. “Multimodal strategies for engaging young Arrernte and Warlpiri children in storytelling and play.” Australian Journal of Linguistics (2025): 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2025.2514175

O’Shannessy, Carmel, Vanessa Davis, Jessie Bartlett, Alice Nelson & Denise Foster. “Developing the Little Kids’ Word List app, a fair assessment tool of communicative development for young Aboriginal children in multilingual families in Central Australia.” Studies in Language Assessment. 12, no. 2 (2023): 286.

O’Shannessy, Carmel. “Young Children’s Social Meaning Making in a new Mixed Language.” In Growing up in Central Australia: New anthropological studies of Aboriginal childhood and adolescence, ed. Ute Eickelkamp, (2011): 131-155.
Thompson, Tommy Kngwarraye. Growing up Kaytetye: Stories. IAD Press, 2003.

Eickelkamp, Ute, ed. Growing up in Central Australia: New anthropological studies of Aboriginal childhood and adolescence. Berghahn Books, 2011/2022.

‘Baby talk’ styles in Arrernte and Warlpiri

Bundgaard-Nielsen, Rikke L., Carmel O’Shannessy, Yizhou Wang, Alice Nelson, Jessie Bartlett, and Vanessa Davis. “Two-part vowel modifications in Child Directed Speech in Warlpiri may enhance child attention to speech and scaffold noun acquisition.” Phonetica 80, no. 1-2 (2023): 1-42. https://doi.org/10.1515/phon-2022-0039

Laughren, Mary. “Warlpiri baby talk.” Australian Journal of Linguistics 4, no. 1 (1984): 73-88. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268608408599321

Turpin, Myfany, Katherine Demuth, and April Ngampart Campbell. “Phonological aspects of Arandic baby talk.” In Language Description Informed by Theory, eds R. Pensalfini, M. Turpin, and D. Guillemin (Amsterdam: John Benjamins) (2014): 49-80.

A resource about hand signs in Aboriginal languages

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