CHILDES Afrikaans Southwood/White Corpus


Frenette Southwood
Department of General Linguistics
University of Stellenbosch

Michelle White
Department of General Linguistics
University of Stellenbosch

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Participants: 15 impaired, 36 controls
Type of Study: naturalistic
Location: South Africa
Media type: audio
DOI: doi:10.21415/T5WC9B

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In accordance with TalkBank rules, any use of data from this corpus must be accompanied by at least one of the above references.

Project Description

The recordings were made as part of a research project on (specific) language impairment in Afrikaans. A total of 15 six-year-olds diagnosed with language impairment by speech-language therapists were compared to 15 typically developing six-year-olds and 15 typically developing, MLU-matched four-year-olds. (The language of more than 15 four-year-olds had to be recorded and analysed in order to find close matches with the children with language impairment, and the recordings of those children who in the end did not take part in the rest of the study are also included in the corpus.) The children were compared on a range of language tasks (sentence completion, picture description, question answering, question asking, picture selection, etc.) as well as on the results of language sample analysis. During the pilot phase of this study, two typically developing three-year-olds and two typically developing five-year-olds were also tested and recorded, and their language samples are also included here. The typically developing children resided in the greater Cape Town area, as did just over half of the children with language impairment. The rest resided in rural parts of the Western Cape Province and the Free State. All children were monolingual learners of Afrikaans, attending Afrikaans-speaking preschools. Most were White and a few were Coloured.

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