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The elevation of Sepedi from a dialect to an official standard language: Cultural and economic power and political influence matter
This study explored the role played by economic, cultural, and political power and influence when a particular dialect was elevated to the status of an official standard language. This was a qualitative study that employed text analysis where journal articles, dissertations, theses, academic books and Parliamentary Joint Constitutional Review minutes were considered for data collection and analysis. In order to supplement the above-mentioned method, 267 research participants involving students (undergraduate and postgraduate) and lecturers from the selected five South African universities, including members of the language authorities, were also invited to participate in the study. Self-administered survey questionnaires and face-to-face interviews were chosen as qualitative methods for data collection. From a dialectal point of view, this study indicated that all official standard languages were dialects before. However, these dialects were considered superior and elevated to the status of official languages because of socio-economic power and political influence. This article further recorded that the status type of language planning in the South African context is quite political in nature, not less linguistic. It was against this background that the researchers claim that there is no official standard language that was not a dialect before.
Journal Article
The Discursive Strategies in the Spoken Narratives of Multilingual Sepitori and Sesotho Speakers
In linguistically diverse and multilingual South African communities, it is common to use non-standard language varieties (NSLVs), often called mixed languages, as lingua franca. These NSLVs are primarily spoken in black townships throughout South Africa. Previous studies show that the discursive production of oral narratives impacts the development and use of higher-order language processing, as they require the knowledge, language skills and abilities to produce coherent discourse. The main focus of the existing literature in oral narrative is mostly on standard languages. In this study, we explore how speakers of Sepitori, a non-standard language variety (NSLV), produce an oral narrative compared to Sesotho, a standard language. The current study investigates the oral narrative production of a total number of 20 participants who are adult speakers of Sesotho and Sepitori (ten from each language). The Sesotho speakers were bilingual speakers of English and Sesotho. The Sepitori speakers were multilingual speakers of English, Sesotho, Zulu and other languages spoken in the Mamelodi township. This study used a mixed methodology of quantitative and qualitative analysis. Narratives were annotated for language complexity in the macro- and microstructure elements: the length and type of clause, pragmatic acts, referential lexical choices and code-switched words. Sepitori speakers produced narratives characterised by interactive clauses unrelated to the narrative level and with a greater range of lexical referents, showcasing more individual linguistic variation. Sesotho speakers produced a more sequential oral narrative in line with story schema with fewer interjections to the researcher. In an increasingly linguistically heterogeneous South Africa, more research is required to gain insights into how multilingual individuals develop and refine their narrative skills, emphasising the much-needed focus on NSLV from a psycholinguistic perspective, which may ultimately inform tools of assessment for multilingual children and adults in social, clinical and academic contexts.
Journal Article
NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND AI AS TOOLS FOR UNDERSTANDING THE KOREAS
Currently, new information about various tools using weak AI, their benefits and risks is constantly emerging. Many of the tools that can be used by Koreanists when working with texts have these technologies already firmly embedded in them. The goal of this article is to test the capabilities of several machine translation APIs, supplemented by translation using GenAI tool ChatGPT 3.5. The test was carried out mainly on a sample of South Korean and North Korean newspaper texts to identify the main problem in machine translation of Korean texts. Furthermore, the article focuses on other textual tools available to Korean scholars, such as dictionaries, corpora, and other resources provided by the National Institute of Korean language and Pusan National University tools such as the speller checker, pronunciation speller etc. and describes its potential and reliability.
Journal Article
Taking Language Samples Home: Feasibility, Reliability, and Validity of Child Language Samples Conducted Remotely With Video Chat Versus In-Person
Purpose: There has been increased interest in using telepractice for involving more diverse children in research and clinical services, as well as when in-person assessment is challenging, such as during COVID-19. Little is known, however, about the feasibility, reliability, and validity of language samples when conducted via telepractice. Method: Child language samples from parent-child play were recorded either in person in the laboratory or via video chat at home, using parents' preferred commercially available software on their own device. Samples were transcribed and analyzed using Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts software. Analyses compared measures between-subjects for 46 dyads who completed video chat language samples versus 16 who completed in-person samples; within-subjects analyses were conducted for a subset of 13 dyads who completed both types. Groups did not differ significantly on child age, sex, or socioeconomic status. Results: The number of usable samples and percent of utterances with intelligible audio signal did not differ significantly for in-person versus video chat language samples. Child speech and language characteristics (including mean length of utterance, type-token ratio, number of different words, grammatical errors/omissions, and child speech intelligibility) did not differ significantly between in-person and video chat methods. This was the case for between-group analyses and within-child comparisons. Furthermore, transcription reliability (conducted on a subset of samples) was high and did not differ between in-person and video chat methods. Conclusions: This study demonstrates that child language samples collected via video chat are largely comparable to in-person samples in terms of key speech and language measures. Best practices for maximizing data quality for using video chat language samples are provided.
Journal Article
Assessing the Effects of a Parent-Implemented Language Intervention for Children With Language Impairments Using Empirical Benchmarks: A Pilot Study
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which a parent-implemented language intervention improves language skills in toddlers at risk for persistent language impairment (LI) as compared with a group of typically developing toddlers. Method: Thirty-four children with LI between 24 and 42 months of age were randomly assigned to a treatment or nontreatment experimental condition. Participants in the treatment group received 24 biweekly 1-hr sessions for 3 months. An additional sample of 28 age- and gender-matched children with typically developing language (TL) was also included. Norm-referenced child assessments and observational measures were used to assess changes in children's language growth. Results: Results from multilevel modeling indicate that children in the treatment group made greater gains than children in the control group on most language measures. Whereas children in the treatment group had lower language scores than children with TL at the end of intervention, the rate of language growth was not significantly different between groups. Child receptive language and parent use of matched turns predicted expressive language growth in both children with and without LI. Conclusion: The results of this preliminary study indicate that parent-implemented interventions may be an effective treatment for children with expressive and receptive LI.
Journal Article
Differential Diagnosis of Children with Suspected Childhood Apraxia of Speech
Purpose: The gold standard for diagnosing childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is expert judgment of perceptual features. The aim of this study was to identify a set of objective measures that differentiate CAS from other speech disorders. Method: Seventy-two children (4-12 years of age) diagnosed with suspected CAS by community speech-language pathologists were screened. Forty-seven participants underwent diagnostic assessment including presence or absence of perceptual CAS features. Twenty-eight children met two sets of diagnostic criteria for CAS (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, 2007b; Shriberg, Potter, & Strand, 2009); another 4 met the CAS criteria with comorbidity. Fifteen were categorized as non-CAS with phonological impairment, submucous cleft, or dysarthria. Following this, 24 different measures from the diagnostic assessment were rated by blinded raters. Multivariate discriminant function analysis was used to identify the combination of measures that best predicted expert diagnoses. Results: The discriminant function analysis model, including syllable segregation, lexical stress matches, percentage phonemes correct from a polysyllabic picture-naming task, and articulatory accuracy on repetition of /p?t?k?/, reached 91% diagnostic accuracy against expert diagnosis. Conclusions: Polysyllabic production accuracy and an oral motor examination that includes diadochokinesis may be sufficient to reliably identify CAS and rule out structural abnormality or dysarthria. Testing with a larger unselected sample is required.
Journal Article
Multimodal Texts in Chilean English Teaching Education: Experiences From Educators and Pre-Service Teachers
Drawing on 10 pedagogical standards issued by the Chilean Ministry of Education, three dealing with multimodality, we, in this research, examined English language pre-service teachers’ and educators’ approaches to the use of multimodal texts. Data were gathered through two online surveys that explored the use of multimodal texts by teacher educators and pre-service teachers. Results indicate that educators were familiar with the standards and multimodality when teaching reading and writing, but lack of resources, preparation, and time prevents them from working with multimodal texts. Candidates read printed and digital newspapers, novels, and magazines outside university, but rarely use them academically. They extensively use social media, even for academic purposes. There is a mismatch between the use of multimodal texts by teacher candidates and teacher educators.
Journal Article