In collaboration with Dr. Jerro at San Diego State University, we’re exploring how speakers store and process noun class information in Kinyarwanda (a Bantu language, spoken in Rwanda). To date, no studies on the semantics of the Kinyarwanda noun class system or any psycholinguistic studies on the language have been conducted. We seek to answer whether speakers of Bantu languages such as Kinywarwanda, with very complex systems of noun class morphology, treat these systems as fundamentally semantically organized, or as morphological classes associated by form properties alone.
Starting with behavioral data, we explored whether Kinyarwanda speakers were sensitive both to morphological and semantic composition of nouns when asked to find the ‘odd one out’ in a group of three. In our first paper, we show that speakers are sensitive to both dimensions, and that individuals differences including knowledge of additional Bantu languages shapes how speakers perform in this task.
Next we aim to gather property norms from Kinyarwanda speakers, which will provide data for a computational analysis of semantic cohesion within noun classes. Using representational dissimilarity analysis (RDA), we intend to quantify the distances between nouns in any given noun class, based on shared semantic properties. Stay tuned!