Linguistic characteristics of SLI in Afrikaans

Southwood, Frenette; Hout, R.W.N.M. van

doi:10.5842/37-0-46

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Participants. Spontaneous language recordings of typically developing monolingual Afrikaans-speaking children were retrieved from the SouthwoodWhite (Southwood & White, 2016) corpus on CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000). To be considered for inclusion, the language samples were required to be from typically developing children younger than 6 years.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s acquisition of negation in L1 Afrikaans

2022

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Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that originated in South Africa as a descendent of Dutch. It displays discontinuous sentential negation (SN), where negation is expressed by two phonologically identical negative particles that appear in two different positions in the sentence. The negation system is argued to be an innovation that came about through the reanalysis of a discourse-dependent (pragmatically conditioned) structure in Dutch, reinforced by proponents of the standardisation of Afrikaans who prescriptively imposed a negative concord structure onto the Dutch negation system. The Afrikaans negation system is therefore argued to be artificially created, making it crosslinguistically rare and syntactically complex, the latter possibly having a delaying effect on acquisition. This study investigates both the comprehension and production of negation by young child speakers of Afrikaans. Sentences containing negative indefinites (NIs) ( niks ‘nothing’ and geen ‘no’/ ‘none’ with a final negative particle) are compared with those containing two negative particles (referred to as SN), which are syntactically less complex. We examined (1) whether the comprehension of sentences with NIs is more difficult to acquire than that of sentences using SN and (2) when and how negation is produced by young children. Data were collected through a picture selection task (comprehension) and recordings of spontaneous speech during free play (production). Results show that the comprehension of SN was acquired before that of NI, indicating that sentences containing NIs were indeed more difficult to comprehend than those containing SN. The production data showed that even the youngest participants (age 3;0) could produce grammatically well-formed negated constructions, but that errors occurred until age 4;3. In comparison with that found for other West Germanic languages, Afrikaans’ complex system of expressing negation seems to have a delaying effect on the comprehension of negation, specifically NIs, but not on production.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s acquisition of negation in L1 Afrikaans

2022

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“…It attaches to all types of common nouns and to the question, reciprocal and quantifier pronouns. The utterances in (33a) with a plural possessor and in (33b) with an inanimate possessor are from the Southwood corpus (Southwood & Van Hout 2009).…”

Section: The Se Possessive In Afrikaansmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dit is Laura-se (trui)

van Kampen

2023

AVT

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Dutch children temporarily use a possessor se construction with proper/kinship names and pronouns, like dit is Laura-se/opa-se/hem-se jas (‘this is Laura’s/grandpa’s/his coat’). The se possessive is not available in standard Dutch, although examples of it are found on the internet. The se possessive is fully productive with all nouns in Afrikaans. In standard Dutch prenominal possessive constructions show a wide range of variations and restrictions. Dutch children avoid the complexity of the system, but what makes the children apply the se possessive in the first place? I will show that it is due to three properties specific to Dutch. Nevertheless, the se possessive does not persist in standard Dutch as it did in Afrikaans. The Dutch Achilles’ heel might be the early use of weak possessive pronouns.

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Linguistic characteristics of SLI in Afrikaans

Cited by 2 publications

References 30 publications

Children’s acquisition of negation in L1 Afrikaans

Children’s acquisition of negation in L1 Afrikaans

Dit is Laura-se (trui)

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