Department of General Linguistics

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Browsing Department of General Linguistics by browse.metadata.advisor "Brookes, Heather"

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    Child-directed speech in low-SES communities : the case of Afrikaans rural and urban-situated infants
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Coetsee, Carmen; Southwood, Frenette; Southwood, Frenette, 1971-; Brookes, Heather; Brookes, Heather, 1963-; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Most research on child language acquisition has been conducted in the global north (also called minority world contexts or WEIRD contexts), and the findings have been assumed up until recently to be universally applicable, even to cultures in majority world contexts. The limited research that has been conducted in the majority world has however shown that there are vast differences in the child socialization practices which underlie language acquisition and that findings from one culture cannot be generalized to another, not even within the same country or the same type of majority world context. For this reason, research on child language acquisition needs to be expanded to include more diverse and understudied cultures, and these cultures need to be studied on an individual basis and not simply in a comparative light to previous, minority world research. Also, socioeconomic status (SES) as well as urban or rural location can also affect socialization practices even within the same community, further emphasizing the need for varied research even in the same country or region.This study examined a facet of child language socialization practices, namely language input, in 10 low-SES, Afrikaans-speaking households, an understudied South African community. Half of the households were situated in urban areas and half in rural areas in and around one town. This study sought to describe the language practices of this community in terms of the amount of child-directed speech presented to 5-month-old infants, with specific focus on sentence types and contingent speech. The data was in the form of 10 hours of video recordings (1 hour per infant) which were transcribed using ELAN and categorised into the following main sentence types: declaratives, exclamations, imperatives and questions. These main categories were used for child-directed speech, speech about the child but not directed to the child, and speech neither about the child nor directed at the child. There were also three other categories in the analysis, namely instances of infant vocalizations, contingent speech and speaking as if the interlocutor were the infant. These six main categories were chosen in order to describe the language practices of these households in this community, and the data from the urban and rural groups were compared to see if there were any differences between the groups. The results of these analyses showed that, once again, findings from other cultures’ language practices, while being useful for comparison, cannot be taken and generalized as the standard. In this study, the types and number of sentences used as well as the amount of child-directed speech present, indicated that this community “goes against the grain” of what scholars have found for other low-SES, majority world contexts. This topic and study population were chosen to determine what the child language socialization practices are in one understudied community, in an effort to start building a database and knowledge which could facilitate future research and inform the development of culturally appropriate, parent-led, early child language intervention programs.