New Zealand adults who don’t speak te reo Māori nevertheless grow up hearing and seeing Māori words throughout their lives. With the support of a $660,000 grant from the 2019 Marsden Fund Te Pūtea Rangahau, a University of Canterbury-led research team will explore whether adult language acquisition can be facilitated by awakening this latently acquired knowledge called ‘a proto-lexicon’.
Lisa was born in Auckland at the start of the 1970s, living in a small campsite community on the North Shore called Browns Bay. She spent a significant part of her life with her grandparents, often hanging out at the beaches. Lisa has many happy memories from those days at Browns Bay beach, where fish were plentiful on the point and the ocean was rich in seaweed. She played in the water for hours, going home totally “sun-kissed.” “An adorable time to grow up,” Lisa tells me.
Lisa enjoyed many sports; she was a keen tennis player and netballer, playing in the top teams for her age right up until the family moved to Wellington. Lisa was fifteen years old, which unfortunately marked the end of her sporting career. Local teams were well established in Wellington, and her attention was drawn elsewhere.