PURPOSE South Africa's quadruple burden of disease contributes to high rates of dysphagia across the lifespan, with speech-language pathologists often providing services in resource-limited contexts. Variability in training, resources, and clinical practice highlights the need for a national profile of dysphagia management. This study investigated dysphagia practice patterns and professional needs among South African speech-language pathologists. METHOD An electronic survey was distributed via social media to speech-language pathologists providing dysphagia services. Convenience and snowball sampling were used. Responses from 124 participants were analysed descriptively, while qualitative data were analysed thematically. RESULT Participants represented urban (78.8%) and rural (21.2%) settings across public (38.1%) and private (47.5%) sectors. Caseloads consisted primarily of adults with neurological conditions, particularly stroke and head injury. Dysphagia assessment relied largely on informal methods, with limited access to instrumental assessments, especially in public and rural contexts. Qualitative findings identified contextual constraints, training gaps, limited mentorship, and a need for contextually relevant guidelines. CONCLUSION National strategies are needed to strengthen dysphagia service delivery through enhanced training, accessible mentorship, and contextually responsive guidelines that support equitable, safe, and evidence-informed care across diverse settings.
PURPOSE This study examined the core vocabulary used by typically developing Tamil-speaking pre-school children during structured parent-child play interactions and identified a root-based core vocabulary that accounts for the agglutinative morphology of Tamil. METHOD Fifty typically developing Tamil-speaking children aged 3-4 years (24 males, 26 females) and their parents participated. Spontaneous parent-child interactions were video recorded in the home environment during a structured play activity using a standardised set of play materials. Language samples were transcribed verbatim and analysed using a root-word approach to determine the total number of words, number of different words, and frequency and commonality of root words. Words produced by at least 50% of participants and meeting the median frequency criterion were identified as core vocabulary. RESULT Fifty-one root words were identified as the Tamil core vocabulary, accounting for 54.6% of the analysed corpus. Verbs and nouns were the predominant grammatical categories. CONCLUSION The findings provide a root-based description of core vocabulary in Tamil-speaking pre-school children and contribute language-specific reference data for understanding early lexical development. The identified core vocabulary may inform future research, language assessment, intervention, and development of culturally and linguistically appropriate augmentative and alternative communication resources.
