Heather Brookes

Studies of early lexical development have examined children’s vocabulary composition with the aim of quantifying early preference in the acquisition of nouns, predicates (verbs, adjectives, and adverbs), and closed-class/function words. Their findings show that a noun bias is common, suggesting it could be a universal aspect of early language development. However, only a small percentage of the world’s languages have been investigated. This paper examines whether children acquiring Xitsonga, a Bantu language spoken in Southern Africa, exhibit a noun bias in their early acquisition of lexical items. Data were collected from caregivers of 95 monolingual Xitsonga-speaking children aged 16 to 32 months in Limpopo Province, South Africa, using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI) adapted for Xitsonga. Xitsonga-speaking children’s vocabularies showed a positive noun bias in relation to predicates and function words, similar to findings for most languages. However, separating predicates into verbs and adjectives showed that while there is still an early noun bias, children begin to favour verbs when their vocabularies exceed 400 words. The proportion of nouns and verbs aligns with findings for other Bantu languages, suggesting that languages that share typological similarities may have similar trajectories in early acquisition of lexical categories.

This article describes the adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) for South Africa's 11 official spoken languages. The CDI is a parent-report tool that measures early language development from 8 to 30 months. We developed cross-linguistically comparable CDIs, representing two distinct language families, West Germanic and southern Bantu, using a common protocol. We describe our approach to item construction and harmonization across languages and to obtaining sociodemographic information in different cultural settings. Issues such as language contact and variation, sampling, data collection, and quality control are discussed as well as item selection and instrument reliability and validity. This study highlights key issues for CDI adaptations and other instrument development in understudied contexts and discusses the theoretical implications of adding this diverse set of cross-linguistically comparable languages for early child language research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

This study compares early gesture and lexical development in 1,199 infants (0;8–1;6) across South Africa’s 11 official spoken languages using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Gestures. We examined the effect of age, sex, ecological (urban-rural) setting, and maternal level of education (MLE) on early language development. Age was a significant predictor of gesture, comprehension, and production. There was no evidence of a female advantage, except in one language (Sesotho sa Leboa), where females were more likely to produce words. For ecological setting, results were mixed, with five out of 11 languages showing both positive and negative effects for urban versus rural environments. We found no evidence for the impact of MLE in seven out of 11 languages. We discuss possible explanations for these results.

Despite advancements in recognising the importance of early child language development and linguistic diversity in South Africa, culturally and linguistically appropriate assessment tools remain unevenly distributed across the official languages, posing considerable challenges for researchers and speech-language therapists. This study critically reviews the psychometric status of child language assessment tools in South Africa’s official languages. The current state of tool development is analysed, evaluating language assessment tools available for clinical and research purposes in each language. Tools that assess speech sounds, phonological processing and (pre)literacy skills were excluded, as were untraceable tools reported in previous publications, and tools that do not assess language only but form part of larger developmental assessments. Considering each language version of a tool, 37 traceable language assessment tools (at least 1 per official language), in various states of readiness, are available for use with South Africans aged 0–12 years. Out of these 37 tools, 5 tools, with collectively 7 language versions, have been validated and the statistical results of the validation study published: 4 for isiZulu, 2 for English and 1 for Siswati. Despite advances in tool development, there is still a severe lack of validated standardised child language measurement tools in all official languages of South Africa. Contribution: This is the most recent critical review of the psychometric properties of tools developed for assessing South African children’s language skills, and it highlights that past and current efforts in tool development are still insufficient.

Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) has been widely used to measure children’s early language development in a variety of languages. This study investigates the utility of MLU to measure language development in four agglutinative and morphologically complex Southern Bantu languages. Using a variant of MLU, MLU3, based on the three longest sentences children produced, we analysed the utterances of 448 toddlers (16-32 months) collected using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory, a parent-report tool. MLU3, measured in words (MLU3-w) and morphemes (MLU3-m), significantly correlated with age and other indices of language growth (e.g., grammar and vocabulary). MLU3 measures also accounted for significant variance in language development particular morphosyntactic development. Our results suggest that MLU3-m is a more sensitive measure than MLU3-w. We conclude that MLU measured in morphemes provides a useful addition to other indices of language development in these kinds of morphologically complex languages.

Studies show that speech and gesture develop together with age, and the nature of gestures changes with increasing cognitive and discursive abilities. While there are common developmental trends, cultural differences may also impact development. We examined gesture development in narratives of Sesotho speaking children aged 5 to 6 years (n = 12), 9 to 10 years (n = 12) and adults (n = 12), who watched a wordless cartoon and narrated the story back to an interlocutor. Our results show that narrative ability develops with age. Speech and gesture become more complex. Representational and pragmatic gestures increase, but the proportion of these gesture types changes. Gestures become semiotically more complex and integrated with spoken discourse. Narrative development in Sesotho speakers shows similar developmental trends to those found in other studies. However, cultural factors influence some aspects with Sesotho speakers exhibiting similar narrative patterns in spoken and gestural behaviour to speakers of isiZulu, a closely related language and cultural group.

This paper reviews research on language use among transnational migrants to South Africa since 1990, taking this as a convenient starting point as the year of the first official announcement of the renouncement of apartheid, leading to its legal dismantling in 1994. Whereas South Africa had previously encouraged European migration to the country, limited migration from Asia (mainly from Taiwan) and a controlled circular migration of mining workers from neighbouring countries of Southern Africa, it now experienced a greater scale of global flows from other parts of the world that had not been permitted during apartheid. The result has been an even greater increase in the diversity of languages in local communities. This paper provides an overview of the main concerns and emphases of researchers covering new migrations from Asia and the rest of Africa to South Africa.