From left, Molly Babel, Michelle Kamigaki-Baron, Henry Davis, Carla Hudson Kam, and Alexis Black.
Newly-minted doctorate holder Michelle Kamigaki-Baron successfully defended her dissertation on June 18. It was supervised by Molly Babel. The other doctoral committee members were Carla Hudson Kam and Scott Saft of the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, and the university examiners were Henry Davis and Alexis Black (of the School of Audiology and Speech Sciences). Its title is Exploring the Connections Between Pidgin and ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i, and the abstract is below.
Congratulations, Dr. Kamigaki-Baron!
Exploring the Connections Between Pidgin and ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i
This dissertation examines psycholinguistic connections between Pidgin and ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, in contrast to English, asking whether Pidgin offers advantages for processing and learning ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi. Motivated by community questions surrounding language education and revitalization, it explores whether relationships between Pidgin and ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi support the use of Pidgin as a medium of instruction and whether Pidgin facilitates ambient learning of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi more effectively than English. The dissertation begins by reflecting on community-engaged research through the use of moʻolelo (storytelling) as a methodological framework.
Experiments 1 and 2 investigate cross-language relationships among trilingual speakers of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, Pidgin, and English. Experiment 1 examines language switching and finds evidence of reduced processing costs when switching from Pidgin into ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi compared to English. Experiment 2 uses an auditory translation priming paradigm to test cross-language lexical associations but finds no evidence of language-specific priming advantages.
Experiment 3 examines proto-lexical knowledge of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi among Pidgin speakers, English speakers from Hawaiʻi, English speakers from Canada, and ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi speakers. Across tasks measuring phonotactic knowledge and word-form recognition, Pidgin speakers demonstrated stronger knowledge of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi word forms than English speakers from Hawaiʻi, while both Hawaiʻi groups outperformed English speakers from Canada. These findings suggest that ambient exposure to ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, as well as structural overlap between Pidgin and ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, may contribute to the development of proto-lexical knowledge.
Overall, the results provide mixed evidence for Pidgin-related advantages in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi processing. While Pidgin appears to reduce language-switching costs, no priming advantages were observed. However, Pidgin speakers consistently demonstrated stronger proto-lexical knowledge of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi than English speakers from Hawaiʻi. Taken together, these findings indicate that Pidgin poses no measurable disadvantage for ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi processing and may provide benefits for the development of early linguistic knowledge relevant to language learning and revitalization.
