Sociocultural Factors Affecting Vocabulary Development in Young South African Children

Abstract

Sociocultural influences on the development of child language skills have been widely studied, but the majority of the research findings were generated in Northern contexts. The current crosslinguistic, multisite study is the first of its kind in South Africa, considering the influence of a range of individual and sociocultural factors on expressive vocabulary size of young children. Caregivers of toddlers aged 16 to 32 months acquiring Afrikaans (n = 110), isiXhosa (n = 115), South African English (n = 105), or Xitsonga (n = 98) as home language completed a family background questionnaire and the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) about their children. Based on a revised version of Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) ecological systems theory, information was obtained from the family background questionnaire on individual factors (the child’s age and sex), microsystem-related factors (the number of other children and number of adults in the child’s household, maternal level of education, and SES), and exosystem-related factors (home language and geographic area, namely rural or urban). All sociocultural and individual factors combined explained 25% of the variance in expressive vocabulary size. Partial correlations between these sociocultural factors and the toddlers’ expressive vocabulary scores on 10 semantic domains yielded important insights into the impact of geographic area on the nature and size of children’s expressive vocabulary. Unlike in previous studies, maternal level of education and SES did not play a significant role in predicting children’s expressive vocabulary scores. These results indicate that there exists an interplay of sociocultural and individual influences on vocabulary development that requires a more complex ecological model of language development to understand the interaction between various sociocultural factors in diverse contexts.

Development and initial validation of productive vocabulary tests for isiZulu, Siswati and English in South Africa

“…In the EGRS 2, a quarter of caregivers indicated that they never used English at home and 40% indicated that they never speak English to others (Schaefer & Kotzé, 2019). In contrast to Southwood et al (2021), we did not find an effect of school location on isiZulu/Siswati vocabulary. This may be the result of from the school sampling which included very few strictly urban schools (Kitsao-Wekulo et al, 2019).…”

“…In line with Kitsao-Wekulo et al (2019) and Southwood et al (2021), SES did not affect vocabulary in either language in this study. Biological sex also did not affect vocabulary scores, a result that counters that of Kitsao-Wekulo et al (2019) and Mazibuko and Chimbari (2020), who found an advantage for males on their tests.…”

“…However, item scores did not always correspond to their expected difficulty, highlighting the need for reliable corpus data. Southwood et al (2021) adapted the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory into isiXhosa, Xitsonga, English, and Afrikaans and collected parent reported data for monolingual toddlers (aged 16-32 months). In Southwood et al's (2021) study, age was the best predictor of productive vocabulary, girls outperformed boys, and children from rural areas performed more poorly.…”

Using Parent Report to Measure Vocabulary in Young Bilingual Children: A Scoping Review

“…Although over 30 language pairs have been investigated, most are represented in only a few studies, and there remain many languages still to be investigated (see Kidd & Garcia, 2022 (Singh et al, 2022). In South Africa, an inter-university collaboration is focused on developing CDIs for all South African languages (e.g., Southwood et al, 2021). Other efforts are working on documentation of under-studied languages (Hellwig et al, 2021) Second, the literature on parent reported vocabulary development in bilingual children has focused on production, rather than comprehension, and primarily in toddlers, rather than children under 1 ½ years of age.…”

Play-Based Learning as a Strategy to Prepare Grade R Learners for Formal Education in Waterberg District of Limpopo, South Africa

“…Play is considered as an educational powerful process that learning will occur spontaneously, even if an adult is not present. Play reveal children's intellectual and emotional needs and play has an educational and developmental function as it enables children to control their behavior and accept the limitations of the real world and furthers the development of the ego and a sense of reality (Southwood, White et al, 2021).…”