Formalizing the collaboration between the University of Pretoria and Leibniz University Hannover, Germany.

Posted on May 23, 2018

Multi-lingualism moves into the big data space…

On Friday, 11 May 2018, Prof Ulrike Lüdtke, head of the Department of Speech and Language Pedagogy & Therapy, managing director of the Institute of Special Education, one of the largest institutes of the Faculty of Humanities of the Leibniz University Hannover (LUH), in Germany visited the Centre for AAC at the University of Pretoria (UP). The purpose of this visit was to formalize our earlier collaboration by signing a formal Memorandum of Understanding between the University of Pretoria and Leibniz University Hannover. A new potential research project with the provisional title: Researching multilingual development in South Africa in collaboration with the Lab for Relational Communication Research at LUH was discussed.

The Lab for Relational Communication Research is a newly founded research collaboration between the Institute of Special Education, Department of Speech and Language Pedagogy & Therapy (Prof Ulrike Lüdtke) and the Institute of Information Processing (Prof Bodo Rosenhahn, Prof Jörn Ostermann) at LUH. The Lab investigates dialogic communication and its context factors e.g. growing up multilingual. For these purposes latest solutions in hard- and software for analysing audio, video and motion data are being developed. In this case a system to collect and analyse large speech samples. Using the system will assist with the creation of big data for the different languages of South Africa which will provide insight into language development and aid with strengthening and promoting these languages in interaction and in education.

Many interested researchers from different UP departments and faculties as well as the CSIR attended this exciting initial meeting. Watch this research – using big data is bound to challenge how we’ve always thought about multi-lingualism and code switching!

- Author Prof. Juan Bornman

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