Purpose: The language that children hear early in life is associated with their speech-language outcomes. This line of research relies on naturalistic observations of children's language input, often captured with daylong audio recordings. However, the large quantity of data that daylong recordings generate requires novel analytical tools to…

Child speech is highly variable. The speech apparatus--the vocal tract, tongue, teeth, and vocal folds--develop at different rates for different children, which helps explain some of the variability in children's speech. For example, the ratio of the oral to pharyngeal cavities changes as children age, making it difficult to establish reliable…

Drawing from long-term ethnographic research in the Andes, this paper examines one Quechua-speaking Indigenous bilingual educator's trajectory as she traversed (and traverses) from rural highland communities of southern Peru through development as teacher, teacher educator, researcher, and advocate for Indigenous identity and language…

Utilizing Ruiz's (1984, 1995) language orientation and language policy work, this ethnographic study compared two intercultural bilingual education (IBE) schools located in two Wichí-Weenhayek communities on both sides of the Argentinean-Bolivian border. We examined Wichí-Weenhayek and non-Indigenous teachers' profiles, teacher-student…

Within discourses of language endangerment, life stages such as child language acquisition, adolescent language shift, and the death of community elders figure prominently, but what of the role of other, intermediate life stages during adulthood and professional life in the course of language obsolescence or revitalization? Drawing from long-term…

Intercultural bilingual education (IBE) has been discussed in Bolivia since the 1970s. The first Educational Act with a bilingual and intercultural curriculum adapted to cultural and linguistic diversity--Ley de Reforma Educativa--was passed in 1994 with implementation starting in 1996. However, discussions continued: when the Evo Morales…

In line with a broader Latin American turn to the left, since 2006 Bolivia's "politics of change" of president Evo Morales includes a new "decolonising" education reform called "Avelino Sinani Elizardo Perez" (ASEP). With the aim to break down deep historical processes of indigenous denial and exclusion in education,…

Working in Latin America for several decades to address the educational needs of poor and indigenous groups, the GTZ (Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit) has helped to develop the knowledge base of intercultural bilingual education. The goal of this article is to analyze Germany's impact from the mid-1970s to the present as the GTZ has…

Educational reform efforts in Bolivia have created possibilities for teacher-training institutions to focus on bilingual intercultural education. How teacher trainers and future teachers embark upon this endeavor differs somewhat depending on the sociolinguistic, historical, and institutional contexts of each community. This article reports…

This dissertation uses the generative framework to study the syntax and pragmatics of word order variation in the Andean Spanish of Bolivia and Ecuador. While Standard Spanish has basic order SVO, in Andean Spanish the object frequently appears in preverbal position, resulting in alternative orders (e.g. OVS). Previous studies have attributed this…

Building on 18 months of fieldwork in the Bolivian highlands, this dissertation examines how traversing landscapes, through the mediation of spatial practices and spoken words, are embedded in systems of belief. By focusing on "wak'as" (i.e. sacred objects) and on how the inhabitants of the Altiplano relate to the Andean deities known as…

Volume I, the reader, has 86 lessons consisting of short passages and vocabulary lists. The language and the stories presented were learned and collected at the Indian community and Hacienda of Cayara near Potosi, Bolivia. Translations of the passages are provided in a separate section. The second volume presents the grammar and phonology of the…

Ten grammars of indigenous Bolivian languages are presented in these two volumes of Bolivian Indian Grammars. The data were gathered and analyzed by members of the Bolivian Branch of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, which has carried on linguistic investigations in Bolivia since 1955. The grammars are presented in the tagmemic model of Pike…

The student manual contains no grammatical explanation or other commentary. The Aymara material is presented in a pedagogical manner for ease in reading the dialogues and reviews and for structural clarity in the exercises. The translations are provided in both Spanish and English, making the volume ready for use with students whose first language…