A Pilot Mobile App to Collect South African Child Language Data

To create effective early childhood development resources and language development intervention programs, we must be informed of linguistic developmental benchmarks. To be informed, we need data - in quality and quantity. In South Africa, there is a project undergoing language data collection in 10 of our 12 official languages, in the form of standardised questionnaires answered by caregivers. For the final phase of data collection, approximately 20000 questionnaire responses are required. To do so, we present the pilot version of a multi-modal mobile app. This app is the product of an extensive user-centered co-design process with stakeholders ranging from lead researchers to young mothers, where their feedback has been the main design influence. It has supplementary audio support, as a mode of presenting the questionnaire and data collection. The pilot app contains a subset of the questionnaire in three languages - South African English, isiXhosa and Afrikaans.