Australian languages have often been noted for their high rates of phonological uniformity cross-linguistically; investigations into the phonetics of these languages, however, have revealed rich phonetic variation below the phonological level. In the current study, the phonetic correlates of stress in thirteen Australian languages with fixed initial stress placement are investigated using corpus phonetics methods and based on archival field recordings of natural speech. Across these languages, a high f0 peak is a common correlate of initial stress, as has often been cited in the literature; increased vowel duration is similarly common. Effects of onset consonant or post-tonic consonant lengthening have been noted for many Australian languages and are sometimes found in this study, though the lengthening may only apply to one or two of stops, nasals, and glides.

We present the first proposal of detailed internal subgrouping and higher-order structure of the Pama-Nyungan family of Australian languages. Previous work has identified more than twenty-five primary subgroups in the family, with little indication of how these groups might fit together. Some work has assumed that reconstruction of higher nodes in the tree was impossible, either because extensive internal borrowing has obscured more remote relations, or because the languages are not sufficiently well attested (see, for example, Bowern & Koch 2004b, Dixon 1997). With regard to the first objection, work by Alpher and Nash (1999) and Bowern and colleagues (2011) shows that loan levels are not high enough to obscure vertical transmission for all but a few languages. New data remove the second objection. Here we use Bayesian phylogenetic inference to show that the Pama-Nyungan tree has a discernible internal subgrouping. We identify four major divisions within the family and discuss the implications of this grouping for future work on the family.

Psycholinguistic theories are based on a very small set of unrepresentative languages, so it is as yet unclear how typological variation shapes mechanisms supporting language use. In this article we report the first on-line experimental study of sentence production in an Australian free word order language: Murrinhpatha. Forty-six adult native speakers of Murrinhpatha described a series of unrelated transitive scenes that were manipulated for humanness (±human) in the agent and patient roles while their eye movements were recorded. Speakers produced a large range of word orders, consistent with the language having flexible word order, with variation significantly influenced by agent and patient humanness. An analysis of eye movements showed that Murrinhpatha speakers' first fixation on an event character did not alone determine word order; rather, early in speech planning participants rapidly encoded BOTH event characters and their relationship to each other. That is, they engaged in Relational Encoding, laying down a very early conceptual foundation for the word order they eventually produced. These results support a Weakly Hierarchical account of sentence production and show that speakers of a free word order language encode the relationships between event participants during earlier stages of sentence planning than is typically observed for languages with fixed word orders.