A comparison of proficiency levels in 4-year-old monolingual and trilingual speakers of Afrikaans, isiXhosa and South African English across SES boundaries, using LITMUS-CLT

ABSTRACT

This study investigated how trilinguals fare on the cross-linguistic lexical tasks (CLT)-Afrikaans, -isiXhosa and -South African English (SAE) (cf. Haman et al., 2015) compared to monolingual controls, and whether the CLT-Afrikaans renders comparable results across socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. The LITMUS-CLTs were administered to 41 low SES 4-year-olds (11 trilinguals; 10 monolingual speakers of Afrikaans, isiXhosa and SAE) and the LITMUS-CLT-Afrikaans to 11 mid-SES 4-year-old monolinguals. Results (a) indicate that trilinguals’ proficiency in their exposure-dominant language did not differ significantly from monolinguals’ proficiency, but their proficiency in their additional two languages was significantly lower than monolinguals’ proficiency; (b) reflect the extent, but not current amount, of exposure trilinguals had had over time to each of their languages; and (c) show that low and mid-SES monolinguals differed significantly on noun-related, but not verb-related, CLT measures. Possible reasons for and the clinical implications of these results are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Cross-linguistic lexical tasks
• measure of vocabulary/lexical development
• monolingual development
• multilingual vocabulary/lexical development
• socioeconomic status
• trilingual development

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the participants and their families for sacrificing their time in order to participate in this study; the principals and teachers who gave us access to these persons and provided test venues and our research assistants, Lauren Onraët, Naledi Yaziyo and Dirk Liebenberg, for helping with data collection, translation and transcription.

Declaration of interest

This study was made possible by the financial assistance of the Harry Crossley Foundation and the National Research Foundation of South Africa. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and therefore the funding agencies do not accept any liability in regard thereto. The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes

¹ We follow Hoff-Ginsberg (1991) and Scheele et al. (2010) in considering both maternal and paternal education level in gauging SES, rather than only maternal education level (as is often done in child language acquisition studies). The reasoning here is that few of the low SES participants in the study spent significantly more time with their mother than father (often being looked after by a grandparent or other family member in the first months of their lives, before being sent to full-day crèche care). Additionally, in some of the cultural groups represented by the participants in this study, the descent, education and profession of the male head of the household (rather than those of the female) are important determinants of the social status of the family.

² Cape Flats English is a non-standard dialect of SAE spoken by the so-called ‘coloured’ population in the greater Cape Town area of the Western Cape Province. It resulted from long-term English-Afrikaans language contact in the communities based in this area and contains many features that are transferred from Afrikaans, but also certain distinctive features. Cf. McCormick (1989, 1993) and Stone (1995) for detailed descriptions.