Child Language Africa
Child Language Development Node
Transforming our knowledge of language and communication development in children in the multilingual South African context
Welcome to Child Language Africa: Home of the Child Language Development Node
CLDN Overview
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.
Our vision
To improve the language and developmental outcomes of South Africa’s children by building the knowledge, tools, technologies and professional capacity needed to understand and support child language development in all South African languages.
Our mission
To create a sustainable national infrastructure for child language research by generating and digitising data, developing culturally and linguistically appropriate measurement tools, advancing NLP and AI methods for the study of language development and translating research into interventions that support children, families and practitioners.
Our aims
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;
- use NLP and AI technologies to analyse, predict and better understand child language development;
- strengthen professional capacity in indigeneous languages across health, rehabilitation and education sectors; and
- develop evidence-based interventions to support language acquisition and cognitive development.
The Child Language Development Node 