ACLA2 - People
Main Investigators
Gillian Wigglesworth
The University of Melbourne
Jane Simpson
The University of Sydney
PhD Students
Sally Dixon
The University of Sydney
Sally completed undergraduate studies in Linguistics and Psychology at the University of NSW, with an honours thesis investigating language planning in the Torres Strait. She has also completed a Graduate Certificate in Language Endangerment Studies at Monash University. Sally is enrolled as a PhD student at the University of Sydney, and her project will investigate how Aboriginal children are acquiring code-switching behaviour as part of their multilingual development.
Sally worked at Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre [www.wangkamaya.org.au] from 2006-2008. In her role as community linguist she helped develop community language resources, as well as undertaking language documentation and description work. Prior to that she worked in the Philippines in an Indigenous Education NGO, helping to structure the multilingual curriculum and make multilingual resources for the schools.
Aidan Wilson
University of Melbourne
Aidan is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He grew up in Sydney and earned a Bachelor of Liberal Arts with honours in Linguistics in 2006 at the University of Sydney. His honours thesis investigated some aspects of the syntax of verb constructions in Wagiman, a Gunwinyguan language from the Katherine region.
Since completing his honours, Aidan has continued working with the Wagiman people to produce a dictionary. He has also been teaching undergraduate linguistics at the University of Sydney and has been working as an archivist at the Pacific and Regional Archive of Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures [paradisec.org.au].
Aidan’s honours thesis is available here: http://hdl.handle.net/2123/5385
Postdoctoral Research Assistant
Debbie Loakes
The University of Melbourne
Debbie began working on the ACLA2 project in 2008. Debbie works part-time on the ACLA2 project, and also works on a number of other projects in the field of phonetics. She works on Indigenous Australian languages, and Australian English.
Debbie completed her undergraduate studies at Monash University, with an honours thesis in the area of forensic linguistics. She completed a PhD at The University of Melbourne in 2006, investigating individuality in twins’ speech from a forensic speaker identification perspective. Since that time she has worked on several projects investigating the phonetics of Indigenous languages, including Bininj Gun-Wok, Warlpiri and Iwaidja. More recently, she has been involved in projects with Janet Fletcher using electropalatography techniques to investigate articulatory properties of these languages.
Debbie has also taught course at The University of Melbourne and La Trobe University, and carried out casework in forensic speaker comparison.
The ACLA2 group. Front - Gillian Wigglesworth, Sally Dixon. Back – Jane Simpson, Therese Carr, Debbie Loakes
Sally Dixon(ACLA2), Samantha Disbray (ACLA1)