Lexical development of noun and predicate comprehension and production in isiZulu

Abstract

This study seeks to investigate the development of noun and predicate comprehension and production in isiZulu-speaking children between the ages of 25 and 36 months. It compares lexical comprehension and production in isiZulu, using an Italian developed and validated vocabulary assessment tool: The Picture Naming Game (PiNG) developed by Bello, Giannantoni, Pettenati, Stefanini and Caselli (2012). The PiNG tool includes four subtests, one each for subnoun comprehension (NC), noun production (NP), predicate comprehension (PC), and predicate production (PP). Children are shown these lexical items and then asked to show comprehension and produce certain lexical items. After adaptation into the South African context, the adapted version of PiNG was used to directly assess the lexical development of isiZulu with the three main objectives to (1) test the efficiency of the adaptation of a vocabulary tool to measure isiZulu comprehension and production development, (2) test previous findings done in many cross-linguistic comparisons that have found that both comprehension and production performance increase with age for a lesser-studied language, and (3) present our findings around the comprehension and production of the linguistic categories of nouns and predicates. An analysis of the results reported in this study show an age effect throughout the entire sample. Across all the age groups, the comprehension of the noun and predicate subtests was better performed than the production of noun and predicate subtests. With regard to lexical items, the responses of children showed an influence of various factors, including the late acquisition of items, possible problems with stimuli presented to them, and the possible input received by the children from their home environment.

Sociocultural Factors Affecting Vocabulary Development in Young South African Children

“…A possible explanation for these findings may lie in the level of exposure children have to animals and representations of animals in different geographic environments below 30 months of age. In a study of 2- to 3-year-old isiZulu-speaking urban children, names of domestic animals such as chicken were produced by 78% of children, but names of wild animals like lion and crocodile were only produced by 8% and 3% of children, respectively ( Kunene and Ahmed, 2016 ). Children who have early exposure to representations of animals in the form of toys or on television and in books (which is more likely in urban areas with more resources) will produce more animal names than children who have little exposure to animals (in under-resourced urban areas and rural areas) unless there is a greater variety of actual animals in rural areas.…”

Development and evaluation of the Ingwavuma receptive vocabulary test: A tool for assessing receptive vocabulary in isiZulu-speaking preschool children

“…We considered that isiZulu-speaking children's inventory has been linked to linguistic input at home (Kunene-Nicolas & Ahmed, 2016). Therefore, the influence of a child's background and developmental history on both the quality and quantity of language development are critical to language development (McLaughlin, Sheridan, & Nelson, 2017).…”