Southwood Frenette, White Michelle J, Brookes Heather, Pascoe Michelle, Ndhambi Mikateko, Yalala Sefela, Mahura Olebeng, Mössmer Martin, Oosthuizen Helena, Brink Nina, Alcock Katie
Department of General Linguistics, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa.
Linguistics Section, School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa.
Front Psychol. 2021 May 11;12:642315. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.642315. eCollection 2021.
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 ( = 110), isiXhosa ( = 115), South African English ( = 105), or Xitsonga ( = 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.
社会文化对儿童语言技能发展的影响已得到广泛研究，但大多数研究结果是在北方背景下得出的。考虑到一系列个体和社会文化因素对幼儿表达性词汇量的影响，当前这项跨语言、多地点的研究在南非尚属首次。以南非荷兰语（= 110）、科萨语（= 115）、南非英语（= 105）或聪加语（= 98）为母语的16至32个月大幼儿的照料者完成了一份家庭背景问卷以及关于其孩子的麦克阿瑟-贝茨交流发展量表（CDI）。基于布伦芬布伦纳（1977）生态系统理论的修订版，从家庭背景问卷中获取了有关个体因素（孩子的年龄和性别）、微观系统相关因素（孩子家庭中其他孩子的数量和成人数量、母亲的教育水平和社会经济地位）以及外部系统相关因素（母语和地理区域，即农村或城市）的信息。所有社会文化和个体因素共同解释了表达性词汇量变异的25%。这些社会文化因素与幼儿在10个语义领域的表达性词汇得分之间的偏相关，为地理区域对儿童表达性词汇的性质和数量的影响提供了重要见解。与以往研究不同的是，母亲的教育水平和社会经济地位在预测儿童表达性词汇得分方面并未发挥显著作用。这些结果表明，社会文化和个体影响在词汇发展中存在相互作用，这需要一个更复杂的语言发展生态模型来理解不同背景下各种社会文化因素之间的相互作用。
