Zulu oral narrative development from a speech and gesture perspective

Nicolas, Ramona Kunene

doi:10.5785/31-3-560

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Despite an increase, there are still too few academic studies on the comprehension and production of South African Bantu languages. Those available include studies focusing on phonological development (Gxilishe, 2004 ; Pascoe & Smouse, 2012 ); nominal morphology (Gxilishe, 2008 ); morphosyntactic development of the noun classes (Kunene, 1979 ; Tsonope, 1987 ); the development of the passive construction (Bortz, 2013 ; Demuth, 2003 ); and pragmatic development in late language acquisition (Kunene-Nicolas, 2015 ).…”

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confidence: 99%

Lexical development of noun and predicate comprehension and production in isiZulu

Nicolas

Ahmed

2016

South African Journal of Communication Disorders

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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.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lexical development of noun and predicate comprehension and production in isiZulu

Nicolas

Ahmed

2016

South African Journal of Communication Disorders

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“…From a psycholinguistic and linguistic theory perspective, we have seen the investigation of the noun class prefix and nominal agreement, consonants and clicks, acquisition of word order, relative clauses, morphophonology (for a review on studies of Bantu language acquisition, see Demuth [ 2003 ]; and for contemporary overview of studies on SA Bantu language, see Gxilishe, 2008 ; Pascoe & Smouse, 2012 ) and for pragmatic development, see Kunene-Nicolas ( 2015 ). It is apparent that linguists need to increase investigations on bilingualism and multilingualism which will feed into both research and language practice.…”

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confidence: 99%

Editorial to the South African Journal of Communication Disorders special issue

Jordaan

Nicolas

2016

South African Journal of Communication Disorders

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The role of language proficiency, gender, and language dominance in using co-speech gestures to identify referents in narratives by Persian-English bilinguals

Varnosfadrani

Tavakol

2021

GEST

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The research reported here examined the effects of language proficiency, gender, and language dominance on gesture use in the tracking of referents by Persian-English bilinguals. 32 EFL learners were divided into two groups of highly proficient and less proficient speakers with equal number of males and females in each group. They were presented with a video extract and asked to recount the story in both L1 and L2. The sessions were video-recorded and the participants’ speech and gestures were transcribed and coded to compare the total number of word tokens and the proportion of maintained references accompanied by three types of gestures. The results offered an effect for proficiency level as proficient learners produced shorter L2 narratives with fewer spoken referents and co-speech gestures. Regarding language dominance, the results were mixed as both males and females produced longer narratives and more gestures in their dominant language (L1), but fewer spoken references, which could be attributed to the pro-drop phenomenon in Persian. The findings also indicated that females’ narratives were longer with more referring expressions and gestures, suggesting that gender can modulate the relationship between language proficiency/dominance and gesticulation. Finally, abstract deictic gestures were observed to be more frequently used by participants.

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Zulu oral narrative development from a speech and gesture perspective

Cited by 3 publications

References 16 publications

Lexical development of noun and predicate comprehension and production in isiZulu

Lexical development of noun and predicate comprehension and production in isiZulu

Editorial to the South African Journal of Communication Disorders special issue

The role of language proficiency, gender, and language dominance in using co-speech gestures to identify referents in narratives by Persian-English bilinguals

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