Unidentified and unmet language needs have profound individual, social and economic consequences across the lifespan. In South Africa, where children grow up in a rich multilingual environment but where evidence and tools for African languages remain limited, there is an urgent need to better understand, identify and support children’s language development.
The Child Language Development Node of SADiLaR advances research on children’s language development in all South African languages from birth to adolescence. The Node promotes the collection, digitisation and open sharing of child language data through the SADiLaR platform, making high-quality resources freely available to researchers working on language, cognition, child health and development, language learning and language disorders.
By building evidence on African languages, the Node supports the development of valid, culturally appropriate assessment tools and interventions that can promote language and cognitive development in health, rehabilitation and educational settings.
The Child Language Development Node aims to:
- advance knowledge of children’s language development in South Africa from birth to adolescence, including the effects of social and environmental factors on neuro-cognitive growth;
- develop sustainable research infrastructure through data collection, digitisation and open access language resources;
- create culturally appropriate tools for measuring typical and atypical language development in African languages;
- innovate with NLP and AI technologies to analyse, predict and better understand child language development;
- strengthen professional capacity in indigenous languages across health, rehabilitation and education sectors; and
- develop evidence-based interventions to support language acquisition and cognitive development.
Key projects
Their flagship project is an inter-university collaboration focusing on the development of MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) for all South African languages. CDIs are parent report instruments that ask parents/caregivers to report on a child’s use of gestures, words and sentences. They can measure language development from 8 to 30 months and are good overall indicators of communicative development. There are CDIs for over 100 languages worldwide. These tools have been used to identify stages in language development and obtain norms for early language acquisition. These norms have formed the basis for developing linguistic and cognitive assessment and diagnostic tools in many countries. These CDIs will then be available through SADiLaR as well as the normative data generated by means of the CDIs.
CDI website: https://sa-cdi.org
Contact details
Heather Brookes: heatherbrookes@sun.ac.za