Browsing by Author "Brookes, Heather"

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    Language acquisition in Setswana speaking infants aged 8 to 18 months
    (2022) Yalala, Sefela; Mesthrie, Rajend; Brookes, Heather; White, Michelle
    Little is known about the early acquisition of Setswana, with only a few small-scale studies of children under three-years-old. To address this gap, teams from southern Africa are adapting the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) for local languages. The CDI is an assessment tool completed by parents, which gauges a child's gestures and receptive and expressive vocabulary. This study aimed to adapt and pilot the first Setswana CDI for infants aged eight to 18 months living in Botswana. The original USCDI was adapted by three linguists who are mother-tongue Setswana speakers. Thereafter, we consulted 12 informants who are mother-tongue Setswana speakers, and either work with young children or are parents of young children. The tool was adjusted and piloted on 28 parents/caregivers of infants, who were recruited from two health clinics in urban and periurban areas. Results show that lexical comprehension and production correlate significantly with age. At 8.9 months, children could comprehend an average of 11.5 words and produce an average of three words. By 18 months, vocabulary had grown to an average of 183 words comprehended and 22.3 produced. Nouns made up 50% of receptive vocabulary and 57.1% of expressive vocabulary, while verbs made up 33.8% and 9.5% of receptive and expressive vocabulary respectively. The infants also produced between 10 and 62 actions and gestures, and these were significantly correlated with age. Children at 8-months-old knew an average of 17.5 actions/gestures, which increased to an average of 46.3 actions/gestures by 18 months. High exposure to another language besides Setswana had a significant negative effect on the gesture scores, and the lexical scores had a similar pattern although it was not statistically significant. The factors of gender and area did not have an effect on language scores. The results of this pilot are in line with findings from other studies, however this study highlights some key issues in adapting the CDI for southern African languages and cultures. The early receptive and expressive vocabulary of Setswana-speaking children has different word types to other languages. With further adaptations, the CDI developed for Setswana will be a reliable tool for measuring early acquisition.
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    Xri: A study of contact, and phonetic and phonological change
    (2021) Mössmer, Martin; Mesthrie, Rajend; Brookes, Heather
    Xri is a Khoekhoe language spoken among the Griekwa people of the Northern Cape, South Africa, and was thought until recently to be extinct. Fieldwork conducted in 2018 and 2019 documented Xri spoken by 27 semi-speakers and rememberers, the last speakers of this dying language. The absence of satisfactory studies of the phonetic and phonological effects of language obsolescence and death in African languages, particularly the endangered Indigenous Click Languages, necessitates further investigation. I describe the phonetic and phonological effects on Xri of language contact with Afrikaans over 170 years and critique previous studies of Xri. Innovative data collection techniques used to obtain the data are detailed. Xri phonemes not found in Afrikaans are more likely to undergo change, and the production of key classes of phonemes—such as nasal vowels—are characteristic of informants with high spoken Xri proficiency. The distinctions between click types are unstable in the speech of most informants but there is minimal loss of click realisation, and click accompaniments are resistant to change. A metric developed for measuring speaker competency is also demonstrated. Informants' spoken Xri competency is measured based on their syntactic, morphological, phonetic, and tonological performance (50%), as well as overall lexicon size (50%). Informants are divided into three group case studies by competency score, which are shown to correspond to the degree of change in their realisation of Xri phonetic features. Click sounds have persisted in the speech of even informants with low Xri proficiency, and the findings support the hypothesised salience of clicks as a phonological class. The accompaniments of click phonemes, however, displayed greater resilience to change than the click phones themselves. The contextual biographical data obtained support the linguistic assessment of the estimated date of Xri moribundity by 1960. The metric developed to measure speaker competency has—with further testing—the potential to contribute to future research in critically endangered language research. The data collection methods used for this study are also recommended for future research in situations of language death.