This monograph is the first study of the acquisition of Swahili as a first language. It focuses on the acquisition of inflectional affixes, with a particular emphasis on subject agreement and tense. Other inflectional affixes are also investigated, including object agreement and mood. The study surveys the adult dialect in question, Nairobi Swahili, discussing social, phonological, morphological and syntactic properties. Data, analyses and copious examples are presented of the naturalistic speech of four Swahili speaking children. The data are tested against six influential theories of child language, and the results show that processing and metrical theories of telegraphic speech fail to account for the observed patterns, while grammatical theories of child language fair significantly better. The data and analyses presented in this book are indispensable for linguists and psychologists interested in the acquisition of inflectional material and other cross-linguistic properties of child language.

This book brings together 12 previously unpublished language profiles based on the original Language Assessment, Remediation and Screening Procedure (LARSP). The languages featured are: Bangla, Croatian, Colombian Spanish, Inuktitut, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swahili, Tamil and Turkish. Some of these languages are included as they are likely to be encountered as home languages of clients by speech-language therapists and pathologists working in the UK, the US, Australia and elsewhere. Others are included because they are languages found where speech-language pathology services are provided, but where no grammatical profile already exists. The collection will be an invaluable resource book for speech-language pathologists who wish to analyse and assess the grammatical abilities of their clients who speak one of these languages. This new collection complements previous books in this series on the same theme and together they cover 34 languages of the world.

This text examines the social and political impact of the Swahili language.

Traditional grammars have stated that clitics are subject or object pronouns whose distributional features make them different from personal pronouns. This book focuses on the acquisition of personal and demonstrative pronouns as well as clitics with respect to determinative phrases in a variety of languages of the Romance family and several indigenous languages, such as Quechua. A particularly original aspect of the present volume is that it not only addresses syntactic issues, but also semantic and pragmatic questions that have been widely neglected in the literature. It also reports on acquisition data of languages, such as Quechua, which have not attracted the attention of researchers until very recently.

​Increasingly, global humanitarian efforts are focusing on improving the lives of children. And among the developing world, the African nations are particularly affected by extreme weather conditions, devastating pandemics, and armed conflict. Neurocognitive science offers significant avenues toward bringing needed aid to the continent while creating a template for helping children worldwide. The studies in Neuropsychology of Children in Africa clearly illustrate how the brain develops and adjusts in the face of adversity. Contributors span assessment approaches and public health risk factors, and represent established topics and emerging lines of research, including biocultural constructs and genomic technologies. Together, these chapters argue for methodology that is culturally sensitive, scientifically rigorous, consistent, and sustainable. And although the focus is pediatric, the book takes a lifespan approach to prevention and intervention, modeling a universal framework for understanding neurocognitive development. Included in the coverage: Assessment of very young children in Africa in the context of HIV. Psychosocial aspects of malnutrition among African children. Assessment of neuropsychological outcomes in pediatric severe malaria. Neurodisability screening using the Ten Questions questionnaire. The neuropsychology of sickle cell disease in West African children. Computerized Cognitive Rehabilitation Thera py for African children. As a guide to current findings or a springboard for new studies, Neuropsychology of Children in Africa is a necessary reference for researchers, policymakers, and diverse professionals in global aid organizations, and across the discipline.

In this handbook, renowned scholars from a range of backgrounds provide a state of the art review of key developmental findings in language acquisition. The book places language acquisition phenomena in a richly linguistic and comparative context, highlighting the link between linguistic theory, language development, and theories of learning. The book is divided into six parts. Parts I and II examine the acquisition of phonology and morphology respectively, with chapters covering topics such as phonotactics and syllable structure, prosodic phenomena, compound word formation, and processing continuous speech. Part III moves on to the acquisition of syntax, including argument structure, questions, mood alternations, and possessives. In Part IV, chapters consider semantic aspects of language acquisition, including the expression of genericity, quantification, and scalar implicature. Finally, Parts V and VI look at theories of learning and aspects of atypical language development respectively.

The Sabaki languages form a major Bantu subgroup and are spoken by 35 million East Africans in Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and the Comoro Islands. The authors provide a historical/comparative treatment of Swahili (and other Sabaki languages), an account of the relationship of Swahili to Sabaki and to other Bantu languages, and some data on contemporary Sabaki languages. Data sets, appendices, maps, and figures present essential information on phonology, lexical makeup, and tense/aspect morphology. The final chapter is a synthesis describing the linguistic and historical relationship of the Sabaki dialects to each other and to hypothetical proto-stages.