The size and composition of the expressive vocabularies of monolingual South African English- and Afrikaans-speaking toddlers
Date
2024-12
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Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University
Abstract
It can be said that children’s first words form the foundation of language development, literacy, learning and experiencing life. We use words to organise our thoughts, emotions, and experiences and to interact with those around us. Although children seem to acquire language without intervention, many children are at risk of language disorders or delays. Vocabulary is important, as it has been shown to affect a child’s ability to speak, read, write, think, acquire numeracy skills, process and express emotions, connect socially and even affect their mental health and employment. Therefore, tools are needed with which to evaluate the vocabularies of young children to identify those at risk. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDIs) have been established as reliable and valid parent reporting instruments to assess children’s language development from 8 to 37 months. The South African Child Language Development Node adapted linguistically and culturally equivalent Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) for all 11 official spoken languages in an effort to create appropriate early child language norms for our contexts. Consequently, the first systematic research into early language development of South African children, using these parent reports, was made possible.
The present study explored two of the first SA-CDI data sets to learn more about the size and composition of the expressive vocabularies of 75 South African English- (SAE) and 113 Afrikaans-speaking toddlers aged 16 to 32 months. The aim was to enhance our knowledge regarding monolingual child first language acquisition in South Africa, especially since languages in the Global South are understudied. The results show that the SAE- and Afrikaans-speaking toddlers had a steady and significant increase in word production as age increased, across all ages, despite large individual differences. At 30 months, the median expressive vocabulary size of SAE-speaking children (526 words) and those of Afrikaans-speaking children (475 words) were within the range reported by other studies (360-630 words). Afrikaans-speaking females had significantly larger vocabularies than their male peers across all ages but there was no significant sex advantage amongst the SAE group. Ecological setting was relevant as the urban Afrikaans-speaking participants had significantly larger vocabularies than their rural peers. As expected, based on other studies’ findings, the concepts presented by the most prevalent words produced by all participants related to familiar people, toys, sounds, routines, animals and body parts. The SAE-speaking participants, however, had more words for toys and animals and fewer for people than their Afrikaans peers. As in other languages, all participants produced more words related to concrete entities (like people and body parts), than those related to abstract concepts (like time and placement). Both languages showed a noun bias in their lexicon, although the Afrikaans-speaking children started using more verbs at a younger age than their SAE-speaking peers. The comparison of lexicons between sexes also yielded qualitative differences in both languages. The study adds value as the first systematic cross-linguistic comparison of male and female participants representing this age group, acquiring Afrikaans and this variety of English.
Description
Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2024.