Background: There is a global need for synthetic speech development in multiple languages and dialects, as many children who cannot communicate using their natural voice struggle to find synthetic voices on high-technology devices that match their age, social and linguistic background. Aims: To document multiple stakeholders' perspectives…

Background: This study explores how family language policies (FLPs) in multilingual homes where isiXhosa is the primary language influence caregiver choices regarding children's language development and education. Objectives: The study aims to give insight on how non-nuclear family structures in a selected sample of Western Cape families are…

Despite the fact that in most communities interaction occurs between the child and multiple speakers, most previous research on input to children focused on input from mothers. We annotated recordings of Sesotho-learning toddlers living in non-industrial Lesotho in South Africa, and French-learning toddlers living in urban regions in France. We…

The acquisition of passives is well-studied in many languages, with evidence of crosslinguistic differences in the age at which passives are acquired. The aim of this study is to add to the existing knowledge of child acquisition of passives by providing data from Afrikaans and isiXhosa, two under-researched and typologically different languages…

This study evaluated the impact of a parenting intervention on children's cognitive and socioemotional development in a group of caregivers and their 21-to-28-month-old children in a low-income South African township. A randomized controlled trial compared an experimental group (n = 70) receiving training in dialogic book-sharing (8 weekly group…

Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that originated in South Africa as a descendent of Dutch. It displays discontinuous sentential negation (SN), where negation is expressed by two phonologically identical negative particles that appear in two different positions in the sentence. The negation system is argued to be an innovation that came about…

Orphanage life places children at risk of developmental delay, particularly with regard to speech and language acquisition. The aim of this study was to evaluate opportunities for children in an orphanage in South Africa to acquire communicative competence, by examining adult-child and child-child interactions and by evaluating the structure and…

Details an investigation of language development and subsequent readiness to learn of preschoolers in a disadvantaged Griqua community in South Africa. Notes that preschoolers revealed a relative lack of verbal fluency, associative reasoning, and relational thinking skills, and had a restricted vocabulary. Argues that inadequate language…

This issue includes the following articles: "Vowel Epenthesis in Vimeu Picard: A Preliminary Investigation" (Julie Auger, Jeffrey Steele); "Lexical Borrowings from French in Written Quebec English: Perspectives on Motivation" (Pamela Grant-Russell and Celine Beaudet); "Variable Article Use in Korean Learners of…