Describing the Spoken Language Skills of Typically Developing Afrikaans-Speaking Children Using Language Sample Analysis: A Pilot Study.

Purpose: Language sample analysis is widely regarded as the gold standard of language assessment. However, the uncertainty regarding the optimal length of sample and the limited availability of developmental language data for nonmainstream languages such as Afrikaans complicate reliable use of the method. The study aimed to provide guidelines on representative length of sample and concurrently provide a preliminary description of the spoken language skills of Afrikaans-speaking children.

Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Automatic Analysis of Children's Language Samples: Where Do We Go from Here?

Background: Language sample analysis (LSA) is invaluable to describe and understand child language use and development for clinical purposes and research. Digital tools supporting LSA are available, but many of the LSA steps have not been automated. Nevertheless, programs that include automatic speech recognition (ASR), the first step of LSA, have already reached mainstream applicability.

NCHLT Auxiliary speech data for ASR technology development in South Africa.

The aim of the National Centre for Human Language Technology (NCHLT) project was to create speech and text resources that would enable Human Language Technology (HLT) development for the 11 official languages of South Africa. The speech data described in this paper was collected during the NCHLT project using a smartphone application. The official NCHLT Speech Corpus was released in 2014, but it did not include all recordings that were made during the data collection campaign.

Learning new words from an interactive electronic storybook intervention.

Background:  Children who enter school with limited vocabulary knowledge are at risk for reading failure. This study investigated the efficacy of an interactive e-book, implemented as a mobile application, to facilitate vocabulary learning in Grade 1 isiXhosa-speaking children (n = 65).

Objective:  The purpose was to measure if an e-book intervention, specifically developed for use in the South African context, could facilitate the acquisition and retention of new words at different levels of lexical representation.

Evaluation of formant-like features on an automatic vowel classification task.

Numerous attempts have been made to find low-dimensional, formant-related representations of speech signals that are suitable for automatic speech recognition. However, it is often not known how these features behave in comparison with true formants. The purpose of this study was to compare two sets of automatically extracted formant-like features, i.