Early Child Language Resources and Corpora Developed in Nine African Languages by the SADiLaR Child Language Development Node
Michelle J. White, Frenette Southwood, Sefela Londiwe Yalala
Abstract
Prior to the initiation of the project reported on in this paper, there were no instruments available with which to measure the language skills of young speakers of nine official African languages of South Africa. This limited the kind of research that could be conducted, and the rate at which knowledge creation on child language development could progress. Not only does this result in a dearth of knowledge needed to inform child language interventions but it also hinders the development of child language theories that would have good predictive power across languages. This paper reports on (i) the development of a questionnaire that caregivers complete about their infant’s communicative gestures and vocabulary or about their toddler’s vocabulary and grammar skills, in isiNdebele, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sesotho, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana, Siswati, Tshivenda, and Xitsonga; and (ii) the 24 child language corpora thus far developed with these instruments. The potential research avenues opened by the 18 instruments and 24 corpora are discussed.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.rail-1.10
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages @ LREC-COLING 2024
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Rooweither Mabuya, Muzi Matfunjwa, Mmasibidi Setaka, Menno van Zaanen
- Venues:
- RAIL | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 86–93
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.rail-1.10
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Michelle J. White, Frenette Southwood, and Sefela Londiwe Yalala. 2024. Early Child Language Resources and Corpora Developed in Nine African Languages by the SADiLaR Child Language Development Node. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 86–93, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- Early Child Language Resources and Corpora Developed in Nine African Languages by the SADiLaR Child Language Development Node (White et al., RAIL-WS 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.rail-1.10.pdf