CHILDES Afrikaans Southwood/White Corpus

Frenette Southwood
Department of General Linguistics
University of Stellenbosch
fs@sun.ac.za

Michelle White
Department of General Linguistics
University of Stellenbosch
m.white40@gmail.com
website

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

Citation information

Southwood, F. & Russell, A.F. 2005. Mothers’ judgement of the representativeness of their sons’ language samples in relation to volume of language produced. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics, 36(1): 85-113.

Southwood, F. & Russell, A.F. 2004. Comparison of conversation, freeplay, and story generation as methods of language sample elicitation. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 47: 366-376.

Corver, N., Southwood, F. & Van Hout, R. 2012. Specific language impairment as a syntax-phonology (PF) interface problem: Evidence from Afrikaans. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics, 41: 71-89.

Southwood, F. & Van Hout, R. 2010. The production of tense morphology by Afrikaans-speaking children with and without SLI. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 53: 394-413.

Southwood, F., Carinus, M. & Engelbrecht, S. 2010. The use of discourse markers by Afrikaans-speaking preschoolers with and without specific language impairment. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics PLUS, 40: 79-94.

Oosthuizen, H. & Southwood, F. 2009. Methodological Issues in the calculation of MLU. South African Journal of Communication Disorders, 56: 76-87.

Southwood, F. & Van Hout, R. 2009. Linguistic characteristics of specific language impairment in Afrikaans. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics PLUS, 37: 103-142.

Southwood, F. & Oosthuizen, J. 2008. On accounting for problems demonstrated by children with SLI in the interpretation and production of passive construction. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics, 36: 1-13.

Southwood, F. 2007. Specific language impairment in Afrikaans. Providing a Minimalist account for the problems with grammatical features and word order. Utrecht: LOT. [PhD dissertation]

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.