Leibniz University Hannover (LUH) and the South African University of Pretoria (UP) aim to intensify their cooperation in research and teaching. As representatives of the universities, Prof. Dr. Ulrike Lüdtke and Vice Chancellor Prof. Cheryl Merle de la Rey have signed a "Memorandum of Understanding" during a delegation trip to South Africa in May with Minister President of Lower Saxony Stephan Weil. The Memorandum will open up promising possibilities for interdisciplinary collaboration in research and teaching.
The cooperation is a result of the previous collaboration of Prof. Dr. Ulrike Lüdtke, head of the Institute of Education for Special Needs and the department of Speech Therapy at LUH, and Prof. Dr. Juan Bornman, head of the Centre for Augmentative & Alternative Communication (CAAC) at UP. Using state-of-the-art recording and analysis technology for audio and motion data, the cooperation will be extended interdisciplinary in the context of a joint research project on multilingual children and adolescents in South Africa in various contexts like school or townships.
The newly founded interfaculty "Lab for Relational Communication Research" of the department of Speech Therapy (Prof. Dr. Lüdtke) and the Institute of Information Processing (Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ostermann, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rosenhahn and Dr. Bodo Frank) will develop a portable system for the conduct of surveys and the automated analysis of large speech samples. Engineers, computer scientists and computer linguists of the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment & IT, as well as representatives of the Department of African Languages will contribute to the project in addition to speech therapists of the CAAC and the Department of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology.
