Peter J Keegan | The University of Auckland (original) (raw)

Papers by Peter J Keegan

Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, Jun 17, 2021

To determine whether a multi‐domain school readiness screening, the Before School Check (B4SC), i... more To determine whether a multi‐domain school readiness screening, the Before School Check (B4SC), identifies children at risk of low educational achievement and to compare the educational outcomes between those referred for intervention and those with B4SC concerns who were not referred.

Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, Feb 27, 2020

Journal of Child Language, Jul 6, 2017

Language Resources and Evaluation

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition

Previous research has shown that non-Māori Speaking New Zealanders have extensive latent knowledg... more Previous research has shown that non-Māori Speaking New Zealanders have extensive latent knowledge of Māori, despite not being able to speak it. This knowledge plausibly derives from a memory store of Māori forms (Oh et al., 2020; Panther et al., 2023). Modelling suggests that this ‘proto-lexicon’ includes not only Māori words, but also word-parts; however, this suggestion has not yet been tested experimentally. We present the results of a new experiment in which non-Māori speaking New Zealanders and non-New Zealanders were asked to segment a range of Māori words into parts. We show that the degree to which segmentations of non-Māori speakers correlate to the segmentations of two fluent speakers of Māori is stronger among New Zealanders than non-New Zealanders. This research adds to the growing evidence that even in a largely ‘monolingual’ population, there is evidence of latent bilingualism through long-term exposure to a second language.

Te reo Māori (referred to as Māori), New Zealand's indigenous language, is under-resourced in... more Te reo Māori (referred to as Māori), New Zealand's indigenous language, is under-resourced in language technology. Māori speakers are bilingual, where Māori is code-switched with English. Unfortunately, there are minimal resources available for Māori language technology, language detection and code-switch detection between Māori-English pair. Both English and Māori use Roman-derived orthography making rule-based systems for detecting language and code-switching restrictive. Most Māori language detection is done manually by language experts. This research builds a Māori-English bilingual database of 66,016,807 words with word-level language annotation. The New Zealand Parliament Hansard debates reports were used to build the database. The language labels are assigned using language-specific rules and expert manual annotations. Words with the same spelling, but different meanings, exist for Māori and English. These words could not be categorised as Māori or English based on word-l...

$Research paper thumbnail of The Development of a Labelled te reo M\=aori-English Bilingual Database for Language Technology$

arXiv (Cornell University), Aug 20, 2022

Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

Language Ecology

Style, in the study of variation and change, is intimately linked with broader questions about li... more Style, in the study of variation and change, is intimately linked with broader questions about linguistic innovation and change, standards, social norms, and individual speakers’ stances. This article examines style when applied to lesser-studied languages. Style is both (i) the product of speakers’ choices among variants, and (ii) something reflexively produced through the association of variants and the social position of the users of those variants. In the context of the languages considered here, we ask “What questions do we have about variation in this language and what notion(s) of style will answer them?” We highlight methodological, conceptual and analytical challenges for the notion of style as it is usually operationalised in variationist sociolinguistics. We demonstrate that style is a useful research heuristic which – when marshalled alongside locally-oriented accounts of, or proxies for “standard” and “prestige”, in apparent time – allows us to describe language and exp...

Health Expectations

BACKGROUND Long-term follow-up is necessary to understand the impact of perinatal interventions. ... more BACKGROUND Long-term follow-up is necessary to understand the impact of perinatal interventions. Exploring parents' motives and experiences in consenting to their children taking part in longitudinal studies and understanding what outcomes are important to families may enhance participation and mitigate the loss to follow-up. As existing evidence is largely based on investigators' perspectives using Western samples, the present pilot study explored parents' perspectives in a multicultural New Zealand context. METHODS Data were generated using semi-structured interviews with parents whose children had participated in a longitudinal study after neonatal recruitment. Parents' experiences of being part of the study were analysed thematically using an inductive approach. RESULTS Parents (n = 16) were generally happy with the outcomes measured. Additionally, parents were interested in lifelong goals such as the impact of parental diabetes. We identified three themes: (1) Facilitators: Research participation was aided by motives and parent and research characteristics such as wishing to help others and straightforward recruitment; (2) Barriers: A hesitancy to participate was due to technical and clinical research aspects, participation burden and cultural barriers, such as complex wording, time commitment and nonindigenous research and (3) Benefits: Children and parents experienced advantages such as the opportunity for education. CONCLUSIONS Parents reported positive experiences and described the unexpected benefit of increasing families' health knowledge through participation. Improvements for current follow-up studies were identified. Different ethnicities reported different experiences and perspectives, which warrants ongoing research, particularly with indigenous research participants. PATIENT OR PUBLIC CONTRIBUTION No active partnership with parents of patients took place.