Sociocultural factors affecting vocabulary development in young South African children
Date
2021-05-11
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Frontiers Media SA
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.
Description
CITATION: Southwood F, White MJ, Brookes H, Pascoe M, Ndhambi M, Yalala S, Mahura O, Mössmer M, Oosthuizen H, Brink N and Alcock K (2021) Sociocultural Factors Affecting
Vocabulary Development in Young South African Children.
Front. Psychol. 12:642315.
doi.10.3389/fpsyg.2021.642315
The original publication is available at: frontiersin.org
The original publication is available at: frontiersin.org
Keywords
Expressive vocabulary, South African English
Citation
Southwood F, White MJ, Brookes H, Pascoe M, Ndhambi M, Yalala S, Mahura O, Mössmer M, Oosthuizen H, Brink N and Alcock K (2021) Sociocultural Factors Affecting
Vocabulary Development in Young South African Children.
Front. Psychol. 12:642315.
doi.10.3389/fpsyg.2021.642315