Academic literature on the topic 'Language development'

With an increasingly bilingual population, children have more opportunities for dual language education. Literacy activities at home have been correlated with reading and writing success; however, helping a child learn in a language in which the parent is not fluent could create challenges. Parents of students who attend a K-8 dual language school completed a survey asking how they help their child obtain literacy skills in both languages. Over 200 surveys from both English and Spanish speaking households were analyzed to determine what strategies parents utilize. Follow up interviews were conducted by the investigator to ask additional questions about parent activities and learn if parents had special concerns about the dual language school environment. Reading books was widely chosen by parents when asked what activities they used to help facilitate literacy and language learning in both the home language and secondary language. English speaking families tended to rely more on school functions to help facilitate learning and literacy in Spanish. The Spanish speaking families reported a high usage of TV shows and movies as a tool to help their children develop their second language, English. Although some reported feeling concerned about their children learning two languages at once, the benefits that they saw from the experience outweighed any academic concerns.<br>Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, College of Health Professionals, Dept. of Communication Sciences and Disorders

IsiXhosa language is one of the eleven official languages and the second most widely spoken language in South Africa. However, in terms of computational linguistics, the language did not get attention and natural language related work is almost non-existent. Document retrieval using unstructured queries requires some kind of language processing, and an efficient retrieval of documents can be achieved if we use a technique called stemming. The area that involves document storage and retrieval is called Information Retrieval (IR). Basically, IR systems make use of a Stemmer to index document representations and also terms in users’ queries to retrieve matching documents. In this dissertation, we present the developed Stemmer that can be used in both conditions. The Stemmer is used in IR systems, like Google to retrieve documents written in isiXhosa. In the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa many public schools take isiXhosa as a subject and also a number of Universities in South Africa teach isiXhosa. Therefore, for a language important such as this, it is important to make valuable information that is available online accessible to users through the use of IR systems. In our efforts to develop a Stemmer for the isiXhosa language, an investigation on how others have developed Stemmers for other languages was carried out. From the investigation we came to realize that the Porter stemming algorithm in particular was the main algorithm that many of other Stemmers make use of as a reference. We found that Porter’s algorithm could not be used in its totality in the development of the isiXhosa Stemmer because of the morphological complexity of the language. We developed an affix removal that is embedded with rules that determine which order should be followed in stripping the affixes. The rule is that, the word under consideration is checked against the exceptions, if it’s not in the exceptions list then the stripping continue in the following order; Prefix removal, Suffix removal and finally save the result as stem. The Stemmer was successfully developed and was tested and evaluated in a sample data that was randomly collected from the isiXhosa text books and isiXhosa dictionary. From the results obtained we concluded that the Stemmer can be used in IR systems as it showed 91 percent accuracy. The errors were 9 percent and therefore these results are within the accepted range and therefore the Stemmer can be used to help in retrieval of isiXhosa documents. This is only a noun Stemmer and in the future it can be extended to also stem verbs as well. The Stemmer can also be used in the development of spell-checkers of isiXhosa.

Sign bilingualism is one of several approaches to the education of deaf children in the UK Sign bilingualism seeks to introduce British Sign Language (BSL) to deaf children from an early age in order to establish a first language from which English, the majority language, can be acquired. However, there is little concensus on how deaf children's BSL development should be measured and no practical tools available to assist practitioners in this task. BSL assessments are needed to make baseline assessments, facilitate identification of language difficulties, indicate targets for remediation and evaluate the outcome of educational and therapy programmes for deaf children. This study describes the development of an assessment of British Sign Language development. Issues relating to the type of test required and which aspects of BSL to include are raised. Selection of subjects upon whom to base test development and standardisation are discussed. The BSL test of receptive grammar was initially piloted on 40 children from native signing backgrounds. Revisions were made to the test procedure and a number of unsuccessful items were eliminated prior to standardising the test on 135 children aged 3-13 years. Subjects were carefully selected from the wider population of deaf children as being those who were in optimal language learning contexts. Although this may be considered a small sample for standardising a test, it reflects a high proportion of the population of children who are developing BSL under ideal conditions. Following publication of the test, analysis of data from its use with a larger unselected sample of deaf children allowed comparisons to be made with those in the standardisation study. The results provide insights into the conditions under which deaf children may acquire BSL naturally, even when BSL is not the home language. Areas explored by the study include the comparative language acquisition paths, as measured by the test, of deaf and hearing children from deaf families and deaf children from hearing families with diverse experiences of BSL input.