Doctoral Degrees (General Linguistics)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (General Linguistics) by browse.metadata.advisor "Gruter, T."

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    The role of input in the early trilingual acquisition of English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014-12) Potgieter, Anneke Perold; Conradie, Simone; Gruter, T.; Oosthuizen, Johan; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The study investigates the acquisition of vocabulary and passive constructions by 11 four-year-old children simultaneously acquiring South African English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa in low socio-economic status areas in South Africa, with specific focus on the role that input plays in this process. Input is measured in terms of quantity of exposure (at the time of testing and cumulatively over time) and in terms of quality (as determined by the proficiency levels of the speaker(s) providing the input). Results revealed a significant positive correlation between input and proficiency levels in the case of all three the trilinguals’ languages. The interaction between these variables seems to be narrower at lower levels of input, and the effect of reduced quantity of exposure stronger in the case of lexical development than in grammatical development. The proficiency levels of the early developing trilinguals are furthermore compared to those of 10 age-matched monolingual controls for each language. Trilinguals are found to be monolingual-like in their lexical development in the language to which, on average, they have been exposed most over time, i.e. isiXhosa. Thus, as previously found for bilingual development, necessarily reduced quantity of exposure does not hinder lexical development in the input dominant language. Whilst the trilinguals lag behind monolinguals significantly in terms of lexical development in their languages of less exposure, no developmental delay is found in their acquisition of the passive, regardless of the language of testing. This is despite their lower lexical proficiency in English and Afrikaans and their lesser amount of exposure to all three their languages. Although the passive is considered a typically later-developing construction type across languages, research has shown it to be acquired earlier in Bantu languages (of which isiXhosa is an example) than in Germanic languages such as English and Dutch (from which Afrikaans stems). Consequently, the fact that the trilinguals do not exhibit delay in their acquisition of the passive, despite sometimes drastically reduced levels of input, is interpreted as evidence of cross-linguistic bootstrapping: trilinguals seem to be transferring their knowledge of the passive in isiXhosa to English and Afrikaans, enabling the earlier acquisition of this construction in the latter two languages. The study is the first on the trilingual acquisition of English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa by young children, and will hopefully encourage additional research on multilingual language acquisition within the African context.