When we watch something happen — a person walking across a room, a character in a story going on a journey — we don't just see a stream of movement. We automatically break it up into meaningful chunks: one thing ends, another begins. This ability to segment experience into events is fundamental to how we understand the world, remember the past, and plan for the future.

This project investigates how that ability develops in children, and whether the language you grow up speaking shapes how you do it. We're comparing English-speaking children and adults with children and adults who speak Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara — two closely related Indigenous languages spoken in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands of north-west South Australia.

Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara are among only a handful of traditional Australian languages still being learnt by children as a first language. Understanding how stories are structured in these languages — and how that differs from English — has real practical value: helping teachers, supporting bilingual education, and producing learning materials that reflect the way Aṉangu children actually think and talk.

This project was co-conceived with Pitjantjatjara educator Umatji Tjitayi, who noticed that stories and teaching materials translated into Pitjantjatjara often keep their English structure. We're working together to understand those differences, and to do something useful with that understanding.

The project is led by Dr Rebecca Defina and Umatji Tjitayi in collaboration with Ruby Mineur, Dr Viviana Sastre Gomez, and Dr Peter Hurst. It is funded by the Australian Research Council (DECRA fellowship DE220100073) and has ethics approval from The University of Melbourne (Project ID #32113).

We're recruiting English-speaking adults and children aged 3–11 in Melbourne. Sessions take less than one hour and participants receive a $50 prepaid card.