I am interested in the description and documentation of Australian Indigenous languages; linguistic typology; morphology and syntax; variation and change. Driven by a core focus in fieldwork and corpus-based methods, my research has included language description, variationist sociolinguistics, and experimental psycholinguistics, as well as applied and typological research. As a non-Indigenous linguist I also aim to support communities in achieving their language goals.

My PhD thesis, supervised by Rachel Nordlinger and Rebecca Defina, was an intergenerational study of Pitjantjatjara, a language of Central Australia. I investigated several areas of variation, change, and maintenance in the phonology and morphosyntax of the language, against a backdrop of rapid social change, language contact, and community concerns about the future of the language. The recordings made for this project are archived with PARADISEC and the community-owned Ara Irititja. I was honoured to receive the Barb Kelly Prize for my thesis.

I am continuing to work on the ARC Discovery Project ‘How Free is Free?: word order in Australian languages‘ (featured in Scientific American), which I worked on alongside my PhD and then as a postdoctoral research fellow. My research on this project involves using experimental eye-tracking and corpus data to understand word order flexibility in Pitjantjatjara and Warlpiri.

I have been working with Areyonga School and community since 2022 to support their bilingual Pitjantjatjara program and facilitate culturally responsive curriculum planning, including working with Cris Edmonds-Wathen (CDU) on developing a Pitjantjatjara mathematics curriculum. Linguistic areas of focus include comparison and spatial reference.

Selected publications

• Wilmoth, S., Nordlinger, R., Garrido Rodríguez, G., & Kidd, E. (2025). Word order flexibility in Pitjantjatjara. In C. O’Shannessy, J. Gray, & D. Angelo (Eds.), Projecting Voices: Studies in Language and Linguistics in Honour of Jane Simpson (1st ed., pp. 493–528). ANU Press. https://doi.org/10.22459/PV.2025.16 (open access)
• Malko, A., Wilmoth, S., Thanabalan, T., Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I., Nordlinger, R., Schlesewsky, M., & Kidd, E. (2025). Real-time thematic role assignment in Pitjantjatjara: An eye-tracking study. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 0(0), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2025.2593904
• Wilmoth, S., Meakins, F., & Algy, C. (2025). Small language, big data: Building the Gurindji Kriol corpus to model the emergence of a mixed language. Language Documentation & Conservation, 19, 348–367. https://hdl.handle.net/10125/74839 (open access)
• Kidd, E., Garrido Rodríguez, G., Wilmoth, S., Garrido Guillén, J. E., & Nordlinger, R. (2025). How Does Speaking A Free Word Order Language Influence Sentence Planning and Production? Evidence From Pitjantjatjara (Pama-Nyungan, Australia). Cognitive Science, 49(7), e70087. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70087 (open access).
• Edmonds-Wathen, C., & Wilmoth, S. (2025). Deductive reasoning in a spatial task by Pitjantjatjara speaking children. Proceedings of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, 1, 219–226. (open access)
• Levshina, N., Namboodiripad, S., Allassonnière-Tang, M., Kramer, M., Talamo, L., Verkerk, A., Wilmoth, S., Rodriguez, G. G., Gupton, T. M., Kidd, E., Liu, Z., Naccarato, C., Nordlinger, R., Panova, A., & Stoynova, N. (2023). Why we need a gradient approach to word order. Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2021-0098 (open access).
• Rayner, M., & Wilmoth, S. (2023). Using LARA to rescue a legacy Pitjantjatjara course. Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages, 13–18. https://aclanthology.org/2023.computel-1.3 (open access). Access the online course.
• Wilmoth, S. (2022) The Dynamics of Contemporary Pitjantjatjara: An Intergenerational Study. PhD Thesis, University of Melbourne. http://hdl.handle.net/11343/325722 (open access).
• Wilmoth, S., Defina, R., & Loakes, D. (2021). They Talk Muṯumuṯu: Variable Elision of Tense Suffixes in Contemporary Pitjantjatjara. Languages, 6(2), 69. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6020069 (open access).
• Wilmoth, S. & Mansfield, J. (2021). Inflectional predictability and prosodic morphology in Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara. Morphology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-021-09380-y. Download preprint.
• Meakins, F. & Wilmoth, S. (2020). Overabundance resulting from language contact: Complex cell-mates in Gurindji Kriol. In P. Arkadiev & F. Gardani (Eds.), The Complexities of Morphology (pp. 81–104). Oxford University Press.

Downloads

• Wilmoth, S. (2024). From nominal to verbal negation in Western Desert (Pama-Nyungan): an alternative Negative Existential Cycle. Association for Linguistic Typology Conference, Nanyang Technological University Singapore. Download slides.
• Edmonds-Wathen, C., & Wilmoth, S. (2024). Pitjantjatjara children’s comprehension and problem-solving in a spatial cognition task. Australian Linguistics Society Conference, Australian National University. Download slides.
• Wilmoth, S. (2023). The Negative Existential Cycle in Western Desert. Australian Linguistics Society Conference, University of Sydney. Download slides.
• Wilmoth, S. (2023). Paradigm shift? Variation and change in Pitjantjatjara verbal morphology. Surrey Linguistics Circle seminar. Download slides.
• Wilmoth, S. (2021). Variation in the expression of possession in Pitjantjatjara. Talk at Global Australian Languages Workshop, online. Slides, recording of talk.
• San, N., Bartelds, M., Browne, M., Clifford, L., Gibson, F., Mansfield, J., Nash, D., Simpson, J., Turpin, M., Vollmer, M., Wilmoth, S., & Jurafsky, D. (2021). Leveraging neural representations for facilitating access to untranscribed speech from endangered languages. arXiv:2103.14583 [Cs, Eess]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14583
• Wilmoth, Sasha. (2020). Negation as a nominal property in Pitjantjatjara. Talk at Australian Linguistic Society Conference, online. Download slides.
• Rodriguez, G. G., Wilmoth, S., Nordlinger, N., & Kidd, E. (2020) What drives word order flexibility? Evidence from sentence production experiments in two Australian Indigenous languages. Talk at Societas Linguistica Europaea (online). Slides, recording of talk (captioned).
• Wilmoth, S. (2020). Negation as a nominal property in Pitjantjatjara. Talk at Australian Languages Workshop, Minjerribah. Download slides. [Note this is a different set of slides to the ALS talk with the same title.]
• Wilmoth, S., Nordlinger, N., & Kidd, E. (2020). Word order across apparent time: An experimental study of Pitjantjatjara. CoEDL Fest, University of Queensland. Download slides.
• Wilmoth, S. & Nordlinger, R. (2019). Case marking and nominal structure in Pitjantjatjara. Talk at Australian Linguistics Society Conference, Macquarie University. Download slides.
  • Our analysis has been significantly updated since this presentation and is currently under review. Please reach out if you plan on citing this.

Other stuff

• Interview about sentence processing on the Because Language podcast.
• Wilmoth, S. (2023). The Linguistics and Applied Linguistics Indigenous Curriculum Resource Project. University of Melbourne. Available here.
  • As part of a University of Melbourne Arts Faculty initiative, I compiled an annotated bibliography responding to the following questions. Firstly, how has the discipline of linguistics produced knowledge about Indigenous peoples, in Australia and around the world? Secondly, how have Indigenous peoples responded to that knowledge production? See also public Zotero library and public project page.
• Wilmoth, S. (2023). Representing the sounds of Australian Indigenous languages, Counter Forms. https://counter-forms.com/texts/representing-the-sounds-of-australian-indigenous-languages.
  • Counter Forms is a critical and research-driven type design collective. This text was commissioned as an introduction to the spelling of Australian languages for an art and design audience. It also appears in Amalgam 4.
• Kell, J., Turpin, M., Gibson, P. N., & Wilmoth, S. (2024, May 8). Australia’s Eurovision entry this year is the first to sing in First Nations language: Meet Electric Fields. The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/australias-eurovision-entry-this-year-is-the-first-to-sing-in-first-nations-language-meet-electric-fields-229505
• Online Pitjantjatjara course. This course was developed 1966-68 at the University of Adelaide by Jim Downing, Ken Hale and Gordon Ingkatji. I helped to develop this reformatted version with links between text and audio. See also our paper about this process.
• Fuzzy search for historical records of Australian languages. The Digital Daisy Bates project makes thousands of manuscripts of Australian languages available and searchable online. Some colleagues and I wrote a Python script that facilitates fuzzy searching across the very variable spelling (select ‘Language words’ and ‘Fuzzy search’). See also poster and code.
• A bit about my PhD research on the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language Legacy website.
• Interview with the University of Melbourne School of Languages and Linguistics ‘SOLL Talk’ blog about my PhD research.
• Interview with Superlinguo when I was working in the language technology industry.

Last updated December, 2025.