Unique testing
ground for linguistics
UC academics awarded
James Cook Fellowships
Linguistics is more than the
study of languages. At its heart,
it seeks to find out how language
influences the way people think,
feel and interact.
Use your words
Professor Jennifer Hay was awarded in 2015 a
$767,000 Marsden Funding grant for her research
project ‘Statistical learning with and without a
lexicon’, a project which seeks to discover more
about language patterns in New Zealand.
Professor Hay’s research centres on the fact that
native speakers of a language display a vast
amount of statistical knowledge about when
different sounds tend to occur in their language,
and the relative likelihood of particular sounds
occurring together in combination.
“However speakers of a language also possess
knowledge about the statistical properties of
sounds in running speech, which they use to
segment the speech stream into words. The
relationship between knowledge of lexical
statistics (generated from the lexicon) and
pre-lexical statistics (generated from running
speech) is not understood.”
Discovering more about
language patterns is the focus
for Professor of Linguistics
Jen Hay.
14
University of Canterbury
Professor Hay seeks to use New Zealand as a
unique testing-ground for finding out how this
is affected when you do, or don't have a lexicon.
That is because many New Zealanders have
regular exposure to Māori, but do not know
many words. This enables researchers to
study pre-lexical statistical learning in
considerable depth.
Professor Hay’s team will document the
statistical properties of Māori sound structure.
Then, using the established experimental
architecture to present experiments in the form
of computer games, they will investigate what
knowledge of these properties non-Māorispeaking New Zealanders actually have.
Fact file:
Ņ In 2015 Professor Hay was elected a Fellow of
the Royal Society of New Zealand and awarded
a James Cook Fellowship which you can read
more about on the adjacent page.
Ņ She is also a Rutherford Discovery Fellow, won
the prestigious UC Research Medal and was a
finalist in the 2015 Women of Influence awards
in the Innovation category.
By Bridget Gourlay
Professor Jennifer Hay from the School
of Linguistics will be using her James Cook
Research Fellowship to increase
understanding of accent and social
variability in New Zealand.
This project aims to contribute fundamental
knowledge about mechanisms through which
speakers from different backgrounds understand
each other.
She will be investigating and publishing how
experience shapes different people’s words
and grammar.
To do this she will conduct a series of experiments
which explore hitherto untested hypotheses
about the implications of this detailed episodic
word storage for morphology (word structure) and
phonology (sound structure).
These areas have arisen from her many years of
study in New Zealand English, and will draw on
resources developed through the long-running
‘Origins of New Zealand English’ project. She will
then unify her findings from this study, as well
as her previous findings in New Zealand English,
into a coherent theory, which she plans to
publish as a monograph.
Acute Circulatory
Failure – new insights
Research into Acute Circulatory Failure may
provide insight that can be used to develop
new and more effective drugs.
A project investigating Acute Circulatory Failure
(ACF) has seen Distinguished Professor Geoff Chase
from the University of Canterbury’s Department of
Mechanical Engineering awarded a prestigious James
Cook Research Fellowship.
ACF is when the heart and blood vessels cannot
efficiently transport oxygen to the organs. It is
a severe syndrome common in critically ill patients
and leads to organ failure and high mortality rates.
Professor Chase’s research leverages off a discovery
his group made that found changes in the elastic
properties of blood vessels could significantly restrict
blood flows and consequently contribute to ACF.
This study seeks to confirm and validate these initial
results through both experimental and modelling
work, then to identify the physiological and
biochemical signalling pathway leading
to ACF.
This will shed new insight into how arterial
mechanics contribute to this high mortality
condition, provide new and non-invasive modelbased markers for tracking and treating the condition
and, if successful, provide new mechanistic insight
that can be used to develop new and more
effective drugs.
By Bridget Gourlay
Two UC researchers,
Distinguished Professor Geoff
Chase and Professor Jen Hay
(far left) were awarded prestigious James
Cook Research Fellowships in 2015.
The national fellowships enable academics
to concentrate on their chosen research
for two years without administrative and
teaching duties. They are only awarded
to researchers who are recognised leaders
in their fields.
Research Report 2015
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