The ‘IndiPsych’ project is my Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant on ‘Tracking Reference across Cognition’. This project investigates the psycholinguistics of switch reference in Peruvian languages, especially in Shipibo-Konibo.
Switch reference is a grammatical device that allows speakers to link multiple events in with just a bit of morphology indicating whether the next verb has the same or different subject. It is not present in the languages most commonly used in psycholinguistics, but can be found in languages all around the world. Its complexity and the critical ways that it differs from the the parallel constructions in languages like English make it an ideal testing ground for many existing theories of psycholinguistics.
Shipibo is spoken by approximately 30,000 along the Ucayali river in the Peruvian Amazon. Together with other members of the Panoan language family, it is notable for an especially extensive switch reference system. Shipibo, for instance, is reported to have as many as 13 different markers, where most other languages only have two.
This project just started in August 2025, so there’s a lot more to come.
You can also find out more about my previous working on the impact of ergativity on sentence planning in Shipibo here.
Eres miembro del pueblo Shipibo konibo y deseas saber más acerca de esta investigación? Ponte en contacto conmigo: caroline <punto> andrews <@> ling-phil <punto> ox <punto> ac <punto> uk
Shipibo Konibo joni ikax itan mia nokon “investigación” omankasai, ea wishawe: caroline <punto> andrews <@> ling-phil <punto> ox <punto> ac <punto> uk
Caroline Andrews 