Berkeley School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, California.
Center for Effective Global Action, University of California, Berkeley, California.
Dev Sci. 2019 Sep;22(5):e12875. doi: 10.1111/desc.12875. Epub 2019 Jul 28.
In many low- and middle-income countries, young children learn a mother tongue or indigenous language at home before entering the formal education system where they will need to understand and speak a country's official language(s). Thus, assessments of children before school age, conducted in a nation's official language, may not fully reflect a child's development, underscoring the importance of test translation and adaptation. To examine differences in vocabulary development by language of assessment, we adapted and validated instruments to measure developmental outcomes, including expressive and receptive vocabulary. We assessed 505 2-to-6-year-old children in rural communities in Western Kenya with comparable vocabulary tests in three languages: Luo (the local language or mother tongue), Swahili, and English (official languages) at two time points, 5-6 weeks apart, between September 2015 and October 2016. Younger children responded to the expressive vocabulary measure exclusively in Luo (44%-59% of 2-to-4-year-olds) much more frequently than did older children (20%-21% of 5-to-6-year-olds). Baseline receptive vocabulary scores in Luo (β = 0.26, SE = 0.05, p < 0.001) and Swahili (β = 0.10, SE = 0.05, p = 0.032) were strongly associated with receptive vocabulary in English at follow-up, even after controlling for English vocabulary at baseline. Parental Luo literacy at baseline (β = 0.11, SE = 0.05, p = 0.045) was associated with child English vocabulary at follow-up, while parental English literacy at baseline was not. Our findings suggest that multilingual testing is essential to understanding the developmental environment and cognitive growth of multilingual children.
在许多低收入和中等收入国家，幼儿在家中学习母语或土著语言，然后进入正规教育系统，在那里他们需要理解和讲国家的官方语言。因此，在国家的官方语言中对学龄前儿童进行评估，可能无法充分反映儿童的发展情况，这凸显了测试翻译和改编的重要性。为了研究评估语言对词汇发展的影响，我们改编并验证了测量发展结果的工具，包括表达性词汇和接受性词汇。我们在 2015 年 9 月至 2016 年 10 月期间，在肯尼亚西部的农村社区中评估了 505 名 2 至 6 岁的儿童，使用三种语言（当地语言或母语卢奥语、斯瓦希里语和英语（官方语言））在两个时间点进行了两次类似的词汇测试，两次测试时间间隔为 5-6 周。年幼的儿童（44%-59%的 2 至 4 岁儿童）更频繁地仅用卢奥语回答表达性词汇测试，而年龄较大的儿童（20%-21%的 5 至 6 岁儿童）则不然。卢奥语（β=0.26，SE=0.05，p<0.001）和斯瓦希里语（β=0.10，SE=0.05，p=0.032）的基线接受性词汇得分与随访时的英语接受性词汇得分密切相关，即使在控制了基线英语词汇得分之后也是如此。基线时父母的卢奥语读写能力（β=0.11，SE=0.05，p=0.045）与儿童的英语词汇得分相关，而基线时父母的英语读写能力则不相关。我们的研究结果表明，多语言测试对于了解多语言儿童的发展环境和认知成长至关重要。
