OLAC Record
oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0016-7409-7

Metadata
Title:time-in-space_KA_2
A Description and Documentation of Avatime
Contributor:Prince Bakudie
Contributor (consultant):Kennedy
Contributor (researcher):Rebecca
Coverage:Ghana
Date:2008-11-12
Description:Time in space experiment designed to probe how people orient temporal sequences in space.
The Avatime project aims to describe and document Avatime. The researchers involved in this project are Rebecca Defina and Saskia van Putten. The project included fieldwork in Ghana in 2008 and was completed in 2009. Outcomes of the project are: (1) audio and video recordings of different genres, of which 13,5 hours have been transcribed and annotated, (2) an Avatime-English wordlist, (3) grammar notes and (4) two Master's theses, one on the expression of motion in Avatime (Saskia van Putten) and one on aspect and mood in Avatime (Rebecca Defina).
(Boroditsky, Lera, Alice Gaby & Stephen C. Levinson. 2008. Time in space. In Asifa Majid (ed.), Field Manual Volume 11, 52-76. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.) There are two non-linguistic tasks to assess the way people arrange time either as temporal progressions expressed in picture cards or done using small tokens or points in space to represent points in time. These non-linguistic tasks should be repeated with multiple participants as explained below. Responses are to be noted down on coding sheets and photographed and/or videotaped. For this experiment the researcher shows 4 cards to the participant which depict a temporal sequence (such as 4 stages of an apple being eaten) they are not given in the correct order. The participant's task is to arrange them in the correct order. The next set of tasks is a pointing task where the researcher points to a place directly in front of them both and says things like if this is today can you point to yesterday and tomorrow. The task is then repeated with different items at a different orientation. In this particular case: Kennedy and Rebecca were facing a little west of North (340degrees). I was on Kennedy's right and Prince was on his left. Kennedy arranged the pregnant woman, apple, duck and grandpa pictures L to R. We again had difficulty with the pointing task. He didn't understand the task. But the results are as follows: tuesday pointed up and right and behind him thursday pointed up and forward when he was a baby pointed forward and slightly right (there was a baby in front of us in this direction and I think he was pointing to it) when he would be old pointed forward and slightly right (there was an old man in this direction and I think he was pointing to him) last month pointed behind him next month pointed forward and to the right last year pointed back (I gestured first) next year pointed forward sunrise pointed right and up (I think towards where the sun actually rises) sunset pointed left and up (I think towards where the sun actually sets) Test points: pointed left and right no problem NSEW started out wrong so pointed right and slightly forward for north and left for south. Then when I asked about east he back tracked and pointed quite accurately to all 4. Forward back points accurate Also asked him to point to uptown and downtown (two direction terms that are often used in Avatime directions) and uptown was a forward and right point, downtouwn was to the ground (we were at the furthermost part of downtown and the uptown point was accurate)
English was the language of discussion. Avatime was used to ask some questions.
Kennedy answered the questions asked by Rebecca. Prince was also there and he helped Kennedy sometimes.
Prince Bakudie is a student at the Junior High School in Vane.
Rebecca Defina is one of the researchers in this project. She did her bachelors in Linguistics and Mathematics at the University of Sydney and her research master in Linguistics at Leiden University. She started PhD studies at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in 2010. She grew up in Australia and now lives in the Netherlands.
Kennedy is a student at the Junior Secondary School in Vane whom we worked with several times. He grew up in Vane, his parents are both from Vane as well.
The recording was made using a JVC Everio digital video camera. The file is saved in MPEG2 format with 3400 kbps video encoding rate and 256 kbps audio encoding rate. The aspect ratio is 4:3 and the size of the video is 352 x 576. It is recorded in PAL format.
Format:video/x-mpeg2
Identifier:oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0016-7409-7
Publisher:Saskia van Putten and Rebecca Defina
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Subject:Stimuli
time-in-space
Avatime language
English language
Subject (ISO639):avn
eng
Type:video

OLAC Info

Archive:  The Language Archive at the MPI for Psycholinguistics
Description:  http://www.language-archives.org/archive/www.mpi.nl
GetRecord:  OAI-PMH request for OLAC format
GetRecord:  Pre-generated XML file

OAI Info

OaiIdentifier:  oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0016-7409-7
DateStamp:  2017-02-14
GetRecord:  OAI-PMH request for simple DC format

Search Info

Citation: Prince Bakudie; Rebecca (researcher); Kennedy (consultant). 2008-11-12. Saskia van Putten and Rebecca Defina.
Terms: area_Africa area_Europe country_GB country_GH iso639_avn iso639_eng

Inferred Metadata

Country: United KingdomGhana
Area: AfricaEurope


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Up-to-date as of: Wed Apr 12 5:28:08 EDT 2017