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Dr Lynn Clark says the aim is to “shed light on the speed and mechanism” of accent changes.
The investigation is a first of its kind and will be undertaken by two University of Canterbury (UC) research institutes – the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour (NZILBB) and the Child Well-being Research Institute.
NZILBB linguist and senior lecturer Dr Lynn Clark said the aim was to “shed light on the speed and mechanism” of accent changes.
“They show (the children) a little video, and ask them what happened and I can use those elements of the data in my research because it gives you quite naturalistic speech,” she said.