William Forshaw is currently undertaking his PhD research at the University of Melbourne as a student of the Research Unit for Indigenous Language. He is also an affiliate of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. His PhD research is a longitudinal study examining the acquisition of bipartite stem morphology in Murrinhpatha as a first language. His research interests include the acquisition of complex morphology, the impact of morphological theory on models of language acquisition and the documentation of Australian languages.

Lucinda Davidson is a PhD student with the Research Unit for Indigenous Language at the University of Melbourne. Her dissertation draws on longitudinal data to investigate the development of social identity through language in a group of young Murrinhpatha-acquiring children. Her main research interests centre on the role that language and culture play in children’s development, child discourse and interactional linguistics, especially with respect to Australian languages.

Barbara Kelly teaches linguistics at the University of Melbourne. Her PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, focused on infant non-verbal communication. She has lived and worked in Nepal and wrote the first grammar and glossary of Sherpa. Barbara's research and publications focus primarily on language development, specifically how language-internal grammatical pressures interact with social pressures in children's socialization toward becoming competent language users. She is intrigued by carer-child communication practices across vastly different languages and cultures, including in remote Himalayan communities, remote Indigenous Australian communities, and urban Australian and North American settings.

Rachel Nordlinger is Director of the Research Unit for Indigenous Language at the University of Melbourne, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. Rachel’s research centres on the description and documentatio

Gillian Wigglesworth is Professor of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the University of Melbourne and Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. She obtained her PhD from La Trobe University, Melbourne, and has worked extensively in first and second language acquisition and bilingualism. Her major research focus is on language use in remote indigenous communities. In particular she is interested in the complex multilingual input many indigenous children receive from their caregivers, and the languages that indigenous children are learning both at home and school.

Joe Blythe is an interactional linguist with field experience in Australian Aboriginal languages. In 2009, he completed his PhD at the University of Sydney on person reference in the Australian polysynthetic language Murrinh-Patha. He joined the University of Melbourne as an ARC DECRA fellow where he researches Murrinh-Patha language use in face-to-face conversational interaction and the acquisition of kinship categories. His interests include referential processes, preference organization, requests, repair, prosody, kinship and kin-based morphosyntax, and the evolution of language.