Early Child Language Resources and Corpora Developed in Nine African Languages by the SADiLaR Child Language Development Node

UNSPECIFIED (2024) Early Child Language Resources and Corpora Developed in Nine African Languages by the SADiLaR Child Language Development Node. In: Mabuya, Rooweither and Matfunjwa, Muzi and Setaka, Mmasibidi and van Zaanen, Menno, (eds.) Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages at LREC-COLING 2024 :. 5th Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages, RAIL 2024 at LREC-COLING 2024 - Workshop Proceedings . European Language Resources Association (ELRA), ITA, pp. 86-93. ISBN 9782493814401

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.