The current study explored whether new words in a foreign language are learned better from pictures than from native language translations. In both between-subjects and within-subject designs, Swahili words were not learned better from pictures than from English translations (Experiments 1-3). Judgments of learning revealed that participants exhibited greater overconfidence in their ability to ...

Schaeffer (1997, 2000) argues that children lack knowledge of specificity because Dutch children omit determiners and fail to scramble pronouns. Avrutin and Brun (2001), however, find that Russian children place arguments correctly according to whether they are specific or non-specific. This paper investigates object agreement and specificity in early Swahili. Object agreement in Swahili is obl...

Even though the Bantu language of Swahili is spoken by more than fifty million people in East and Central Africa, it is surprisingly resource-scarce from a language technological point of view, an unfortunate situation that holds for most, if not all languages on the continent. The increasing amount of digitally available, vernacular data has prompted researchers to investigate the applicabilit...

A great deal is known about the distribution of finite and non-finite forms in early language and increasingly, studies are investigating the semantic properties of these different forms. An important question for acquisition theory concerns the relationship between the child's developing morphosyntax and the semantics typically expressed by these structures. In this paper we will explore the f...

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/tvl.v51i2.4 Visions of the future in the ‘new’ Swahili novel: Hope in desperation? Mikhail Gromov Mikhail D. Gromov is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the United States International University in Nairobi. He researches on literatures of Eastern and Southern Africa in English and indigenous languages, Swahili literature, comparative literature. Email: mgro...

Developing Named Entity Recognition (NER) for a new language using standard techniques requires collecting and annotating large training resources, which is costly and time-consuming. Consequently, for many widely spoken languages such as Swahili, there are no freely available NER systems. We present here a new technique to perform NER for new languages using online machine translation systems....

In this paper I illustrate how dancing, as one aspect of ngoma. is one of many status-laden activities in Swahili society. Through a brief introductory analysis of distinctive structured movement patterns, the reader can see exactly how understanding of the uses of the body itself and the space around it contributes significantly to our understanding of the nuances of social roles and the diffe...

Grammatical Framework is a grammar formalism based on type theory and implemented in Haskell, that utilizes the interlingua approach to multilingual translation. Multilingualism is achieved by defining resource grammar libraries for each individual language within the framework. Here, we present the definition of the inflectional morphology grammars for Swahili, as part of the Swahili resource ...