nqn20120825-01

Family problems (DVO) picture task, a structured task for gathering enriched language data for descriptive, comparative, and documentary purposes, focusing on the domain of social cognition. The task involves collaborative narrative problem-solving and retelling by a pair or small group of language speakers, and was developed as an aid to investigating grammatical categories relevant to social cognition. The pictures set up a dramatic story in which participants can feel empathetic involvement with the characters, and trace individual motivations, mental and physical states, and points of view. The data-gathering task allows different cultural groups to imbue the pictures with their own experiences, concerns, and conventions, and stimulates the spontaneous use of previously under-recorded linguistic structures. We ar-gue that stimulus-based elicitation tasks that are designed to stimulate a range of speech types (descriptions, dialogic interactions, narrative) within the single task contribute quan-titatively and qualitatively to language documentation, and provide an important means of gathering spontaneous but broadly parallel, and thus comparable, linguistic data. For more information, read the article here: https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/4504/1/sanroque.pdf All audio is captured with the onboard Zoom microphone. Accompanying video was also collected, though this external audio has not been sync'd with the video. Speakers: Siba Wlila and Joseph Blag for first two phases. In the third phase, when a listener is brought in, they are joined by Amto Kaeko (Nickname: Drondro), who ends up being the one who does the first person narration in the fourth phase. Session is split between four files. In the last one Siba comments (in English) on how exactly the pictures in the story fit the situation in PNG. See field notebook NE2012 p166 for other data from the recording. Note that pictures were given out in a non-standard order – the instructions for the standard order were missing. Nonetheless this was a very lively and interesting telling. Unusual aspect of the interpretation – though shared with the telling by Jimmy and Michael - is that it was the man who had been playing around, and his wife then accuses him when he gets home, leading him to attack her in rage and guilt. The ‘refusing drink’ scene is also interpreted unusually – the adult refusing the drink is a woman, not a man, refusing to join the main male character in his partying, and she goes home to tell his wife about his drunken misdeeds which is what leads her to accuse him of playing around. Linguistic note, for Drondro’s telling: the word dibora, used for gaol, is from Motu (dibora ruma ‘dark house’), the proper Nen word being qébti mng̅ Keywords: Elicitation; Family Problem