Early Vocabulary Development in Rural and Urban Mozambique

Abstract

This paper presents an adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (short version) into three languages spoken in Southern Mozambique. The tool was adapted to study vocabulary development among children of 12 to 25 months of age in two communities: a rural, monolingual Changana speaking community and an urban bilingual Ronga and Portuguese speaking community. We present a norming study carried out with the adaptation, as well as a validation study. The norming study revealed various predictors for reported expressive and receptive vocabulary size. These predictors include age, socioeconomic status, reported health problems, caregiving practices, and location. The validation of the CDI among a small sample in both communities shows positive correlations between the reported expressive vocabulary scores and children’s recorded word production. We conclude that the adapted CDI is useful for research purposes and could be used as a template for adaptations into other languages from similar cultures.

Measurement of expressive vocabulary in school-age children: Development and application of the Kilifi Naming Test (KNT)

“…Beyond simply reporting the development of a measure of expressive vocabulary for school-age children, the current study's major contribution is the examination of the sources of variability in naming performance. For one, age-related differences in vocabulary acquisition were similar to what has been reported within similar (Alcock et al, 2008) and different contexts (Storms et al, 2004;Vogt et al, 2015). These age-related differences in vocabulary scores suggest that naming ability improves with maturation as children acquire more vocabulary with increased exposure.…”

“…For instance, a study conducted in Madagascar concluded that among 3-to 6-year-old children, there were large differences in language development between those in the top wealth quintile and those in the lowest wealth quintile, and these differences increased as children grew older (Fernald, Weber, Galasso, & Ratsifandrihamanana, 2011). Similarly, as reported in a Mozambican study, being a female, having a mother who was educated to secondary level or higher, living in an urban area and being older were positively associated with the expressive and receptive language scores of infants (Vogt et al, 2015). The findings from these studies provide evidence that while taking into account factors that may influence child development, interventions to promote child development, and particularly language development, should begin at earlier ages and should target those who are most disadvantaged.…”

“…Internal (i.e., child attributes such as age and gender) and external (e.g., availability of household resources, neighborhood of residence and school exposure) factors, may underlie the substantial variability observed in vocabulary acquisition among children. For instance, several study findings attest to the fact that children show vast improvements in vocabulary acquisition with increasing age (Basilio, Puccini, Silva, & Pedromónico, 2005;Bates, Dale, & Thal, 1995;Vogt, Douglas, & Aussems, 2015). Although there is evidence of gender differences in vocabulary acquisition, some studies have reported that they are small and inconsistent (Hyde & Linn, 1988).…”

“…The forms of validity that have been tested in earlier applications of vocabulary measures among young children include establishing their relationship with age, SES (Luoni et al, 2015), non-verbal reasoning (Luoni et al, 2015;Storms, Saerens, & Deyn, 2004), reading skills (Luoni et al, 2015;Nation & Snowling, 2004), word production (Vogt et al, 2015), and clinical outcomes (Alcock, Abubakar, Newton, & Holding, 2016;Alcock, Holding, Mung'ala-Odera, & Newton, 2008). The fact that there are few studies reported from SSA demonstrates that much more effort is required in the validation of vocabulary measures that will be responsive to the cultural and language diversity in this context.…”

Infant engagement and early vocabulary development: a naturalistic observation study of Mozambican infants from 1;1 to 2;1

“…So rural mothers reported their infants' vocabulary fairly accurately at both 1;6 and 2;1 years, compared to the speech the infants produced at 2;1. The 1;1 vocabulary scores were not validated, but analyses indicate that in the rural area, vocabulary at this age may be underestimated compared to our norming study (Vogt, Mastin, Aussems & Schots, 2015). So results relating to the 1;1 MBCDI should be interpreted with care, which also holds for MBCDI scores at 2;1 from the urban community.…”