L+PLUS Lab

Kinyarwanda noun classes

With Dr. Jerro, this is an inter-disciplinary research project on noun classes 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, and we seek to answer whether these noun classes are treated as semantic or morphological classes in the minds of Kinyarwanda speakers.

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. Preliminary results suggest that speakers are sensitive to both dimensions, and that individuals differences and additional languages spoken shape how speakers perform in this task. (See our recent talk at Bantu8!)

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!