Abstract
This cross-sectional study investigated the size and composition of the expressive vocabularies of Afrikaans-speaking toddlers aged 16 to 32 months. Children’s vocabulary has been shown to influence their ability to speak, read, write, think, acquire numeracy skills, process and express emotions, and connect socially, and it can even affect their mental health and capacity for work. Although most children acquire language without special intervention, many children are at risk of language disorders or delays. Therefore, tools are needed with which to assess the vocabularies of young children. Assessing children in their own language, before their formal schooling starts, could help identify those who are at risk of language disorders or delays, allowing for early intervention and support. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB‑CDIs) were developed in the 1970s in the USA as reliable and valid parent-reporting instruments to assess children’s language development from 8 up to 30 (and recently 37) months.
The South African Child Language Development Node in Stellenbosch developed one infant and one toddler version of this inventory for each of South Africa’s 11 official spoken languages. Each South African Communicative Development Inventory (SA-CDI) was adapted to be linguistically and culturally appropriate for the relevant language. Consequently, systematic research into early language development of South African children, using these SA-CDIs, was made possible.
The Afrikaans dataset that was collected using the toddler version was analysed in this study to investigate the expressive vocabulary of 113 monolingual Afrikaans-speaking toddlers. Although the small sample size allowed only exploratory research, the aim was to broaden knowledge of Afrikaans-speaking children’s language acquisition, since the early acquisition of Afrikaans, like many other languages of the so-called Global South, remains understudied.
The study explored the size and composition of the expressive vocabularies of monolingual Afrikaans-speaking toddlers in terms of the following research objectives (ROs):
- RO1: Establish the size of the toddlers’ expressive vocabularies in terms of age and sex.
- RO2: Determine the nature of the concepts represented by the words most commonly used in their expressive vocabularies, viz. top 20 words of all toddlers and top 50 words per sex.
- RO3: Describe the composition of the semantic categories in their expressive vocabularies.
- RO4: Explore the syntactic categories present in their expressive vocabularies.
The results indicate that Afrikaans-speaking toddlers showed similar developmental patterns overall in terms of vocabulary growth from 16 to 32 months to those reported for child speakers of other languages. Older Afrikaans-speaking children tended to have larger vocabularies, despite large individual differences. In the 30-month-old group, expressive vocabulary sizes ranged from 102 to 740 words (median = 536), which echoes the high variability reported for other languages (for example 360 to 630 words for American English), although direct cross-linguistic comparisons are not necessarily possible. The comparison across languages is approximate because the precise age groupings may differ between languages; the number and nature of the items in each CDI may differ; the number of Afrikaans participants is relatively small; and the samples differ demographically.
A small female advantage in vocabulary size has been reported for other Germanic languages (specifically, American English, German, Norwegian) as well as for a variety of languages by the Wordbank project. (At the time of writing, Wordbank contained data from 92 771 children and 105 290 CDI administrations, across 42 languages and it continues to grow as new datasets are contributed.) It was found that the Afrikaans-speaking females had significantly larger vocabularies than their male peers across all ages (F(1,111)=10.001, p=0.002, η²=0.08) with a medium effect size. The mean vocabulary score for Afrikaans-speaking females was 53% compared with 36% for males.
The relative representation of words within the semantic categories of the Afrikaans CDI was assessed. As expected, the semantic categories present in the Afrikaans-speaking participants’ vocabularies were in line with those of studies among child speakers of other languages, as they mostly produced words related to their immediate environment, such as words for familiar people. The top-ranked words expressed by Afrikaans-speaking toddlers included words from the categories People (mamma “mommy”, baba “baby”, ouma “granny”, pappa “daddy”, oupa “grandpa”), Toys (bal “ball”, kar “car”), Sounds (woef-woef “woof”, nam-nam “yum-yum”, wroem-wroem “vroom”), Games and routines (totsiens/tatta “bye-bye”, dankie “thank you”, ja “yes”, nee “no”), Animals (hond “dog”, kat “cat”), Body parts (oog “eye”, hare “hair”, mond “mouth”, arm “arm”), and Food and drink (appel “apple”) as well as a verb, soen “to kiss”, and a possessive pronoun, myne “mine”. (This finding of the verb soen “to kiss” should, however, be treated with caution as parents might have interpreted the word as a noun, even though it appears under the CDI category Action words.) According to Wordbank, the words mommy, daddy and baby have been found to hold the top positions in most languages. The eight words of babies and toddlers that are common across more than six languages in the Wordbank database were also among the top-ranked words said by the Afrikaans-speaking toddlers: mamma “mommy”, pappa “daddy”, baba “baby”, bal “ball”, tatta/totsiens “bye”, woef-woef “woof-woof”, nee “no” and wroem-wroem “vroom-vroom”.
A comparison of the lexicons between sexes revealed differences between the top 50 words produced by the males and those produced by the females. This aligns with earlier findings that sex differences in vocabulary are evident across diverse cultures and languages. As this study did not investigate the socio-cultural factors relating to language input or morphology of the languages, one could merely speculate about the reasons for these gender-specific top words. These observed trends suggest that differences in vocabulary acquisition based on sex need further investigation with larger datasets.
The number of lexical items marked by the parents in each semantic category was counted and then calculated as a percentage of each semantic category represented by the lexicon of all participants as had been done in similar studies. The Afrikaans-speaking toddlers produced most words belonging to the three semantic categories of Body parts (60% of the words in this category were produced by the participant group as a whole), People (59,7%), and Sound effects (59,5%). These categories were closely followed by Vehicle words (57%), Games and routines (54,5%), Food and drink (49,5%), Furniture (47,8%), Outside words (47,1%) and Toys (47,1%). Their use of many words in the categories of Body parts, People and Sound effects match those found in many languages in Wordbank and those of the infants acquiring Afrikaans. However, the Afrikaans-speaking toddlers’ use of words related to Animals (41,4%) was more limited than reported by studies of children acquiring other languages.
Afrikaans-speaking toddlers exhibited a noun bias in their expressive vocabularies, consistent with findings from some other studies. Although Sound effects, People, and Games and routines were prevalent in vocabularies up to 50 words, from 51 words onwards Afrikaans seems to show a noun bias: At a vocabulary size of 51 to 100 words there were more nouns (57% of their vocabulary) than any other syntactic category. As vocabulary sizes increased, nouns remained the syntactic category with the largest numbers of words produced, although the toddlers acquired predicates and function words. In vocabularies exceeding 700 words, the distribution was 48% nouns, 29% predicates, 13% function words, and 10% sounds, names of people, and games and routines.
However, even the Afrikaans-speaking toddlers with small vocabularies (<100 words) seem to use verbs. The results show that toddlers with vocabularies up to 50 words included 9% predicates and those with vocabularies of 51 to 100 words included 19% predicates. This was in contrast to previous findings for English, where verbs were scarce among the first 50 words, and for Italian, where adjectives and verbs appeared only when the child’s vocabulary had reached about 100 words. The top 56 words of the Afrikaans-speaking toddlers included nine verbs, namely, soen “to kiss”, drukkie gee “to hug” among the males; as well as dans “to dance”, piepie “to wee”, was “to wash”, soen “to kiss”, bel “to phone”, byt “to bite”, poef “to poo” and eet “to eat” among the females.
The study acknowledges limitations such as a small sample size per age group and limited geographic coverage, meaning that the results cannot be generalised widely. This was an exploratory and descriptive study and did not aim to explain the size and composition of the vocabularies. However, this study adds value as the first systematic comparison of the vocabularies of male and female toddlers acquiring Afrikaans. The results from this study therefore add to the small but growing body of knowledge regarding child language acquisition in South Africa, in Afrikaans, by this age group specifically, and the use of the SA-CDIs, thereby contributing to available information on child language acquisition in the Global South.
Keywords: Afrikaans; child language acquisition; Communicative Development Inventory; expressive vocabulary; lexicon; monolingual; noun bias; parent report; productive vocabulary; sex advantage; toddler
- This article’s featured image was created by Kaboompics and obtained from Pexels.
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