Aspects of the acquisition of Afrikaans syntax
Vorster, Jan, 1937-
Longitudinal data from two age- homogeneous three- child
cohorts covering the age range from 23 months to 35 months
and the MLU range from 1.5 to 4.5, were analyzed with the main purpose of determining the efficacy of paraphrasing as
a method for describing language acquisition, and of providing language practitioners with information on the acquisition of Afrikaans.
The paraphrasing procedure consists of converting deviant child utter ances to minimal well-formedness by means of
additions, deletions, substitutions and permutations. The
main advantage of this method is that it provides for an
objective and controlled comparison between more and less
standard forms of a language. It was used by Van der Geest et al. (1973) to c ompare the speech of Dutch kindergarten
children from different socio- economic milieux, and by Snow
et al . (1976) to do the same for Dutch mothers. In the present study it was used to compare language-learning
childr en' s s uccessive approximations to adult Afrikaans.
The central hypothesis is derived from the assumption of
Greenfield and Smith (1976) that adults and children express
the way they see the world in essentially similar ways. From this hypothesis follow the testable predictions that the
most important differences between child and adult speec h would be reducible to children' s non-realization of lowinformation elements, and that language development could be described in terms of the narrowing , over time, of the gap
between child and adult speech.
In the process of
following from this, substanti al body of
confirming most of the predictions
and other related hypotheses, a information on the development of
children's repertoi res for adverbs, prepositions and verbs is provided. The data base comprising 3900 child utterances,
with their paraphrases, is supplied.
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