Frenette Southwood
Biographic Data
| ID | 5759484 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Frenette Southwood |
| GIVEN NAMES | Frenette |
| FAMILY NAME | Southwood |
| SIGNATURE | SOUTHWOOD F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stellenbosch University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8247-2081 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Is home environment predictive of early grammar development
Research shows that children’s home environment (e.g., the composition of their household and the resources available in it) has an impact on children’s language development. However, this research has mostly been conducted among English speakers from the minority world and has often only considered vocabulary size. This exploratory study investigated whether home environment factors are predictive of grammar development in Afrikaans-speaking ( n…
Instrument adaptation for measuring early child language development across multilingual and sociocultural diverse settings
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…
Mean Length of Utterance
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 MacArth…
A Crosslinguistic Study of Gesture and Lexical Development in South African Infants
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 evid…
The Comprehension and Production of Passive Constructions by Afrikaans and isiXhosa First Language Grade 1 Children
The acquisition of passives is well-studied in many languages, with evidence of crosslinguistic differences in the age at which passives are acquired. The aim of this study is to add to the existing knowledge of child acquisition of passives by providing data from Afrikaans and isiXhosa, two under-researched and typologically different languages spoken in South Africa. Comprehension and production data were collected from first language speakers …
Children’s acquisition of negation in L1 Afrikaans
Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that originated in South Africa as a descendent of Dutch. It displays discontinuous sentential negation (SN), where negation is expressed by two phonologically identical negative particles that appear in two different positions in the sentence. The negation system is argued to be an innovation that came about through the reanalysis of a discourse-dependent (pragmatically conditioned) structure in Dutch, reinf…
Elicited Production of Part/Whole and General/ Specific Articles by Four- to Nine-Year-Old Afrikaans- and South African English-Speaking Monolinguals
This study sets out to investigate the use of articles, specifically the development of part/whole and general/specific article distinctions in Afrikaans- and English-speaking children. Previous studies comparing the development of these distinctions yielded conflicting results. In order to address this gap in the literature, a large-scale study was conducted on two languages. Two research questions were posed: (a) Does development in the article…
Curriculum Expectations versus Teachers’ Opinions and Practices in Teaching English in Rural Primary Schools in Uganda
The expectation of the National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC) of Uganda is that, using a thematic curriculum, learners in rural schools will learn at least 800 English words after three years of instruction in the language as a subject. This article draws on available literature on vocabulary learning by children and on results from a study conducted in four rural Ugandan primary schools. The study focused on the difficulties that learners…
Child language assessment and intervention in multilingual and multicultural South Africa
Research world-wide suggests that service delivery by speech-language therapists (SLTs) to bilingual children is problematic and largely unsatisfactory. In multicultural South Africa, the majority of SLTs speak either only English or only Afrikaans and English. The current state of service delivery to bilingual children, including those with first languages other than English or Afrikaans, is not known. This study was undertaken to ascertain how …
Towards a dialect-neutral assessment instrument for the language skills of Afrikaans-speaking children
The aims of the study were to establish whether there is a correlation between the socioeconomic background of Afrikaans-speaking children and their performance on a dialect-neutral language test, and to ascertain whether the allowance the test currently makes for parental education level is sufficient. The Afrikaans version of the D iagnostic E valuation of L anguage V ariation (Seymour, Roeper & de Villiers, 2005 a ) was administered to 231 Afr…
Specific language impairment as a syntax-phonology (PF) interface problem
A theoretical account of specific language impairment (SLI) – one which places the locus of the impairment at Spell-Out at the syntax-phonology interface – is proposed and then tested against utterances from Afrikaans-speaking children with SLI. Drawing on Minimalism, our account offers a unified explanation for the seemingly diverse phenomena found in the Afrikaans data: omission of certain lexical material, double articulation of other lexical …
The presence of a primary male caregiver affects children's language skills
This study aimed to determine whether the presence or absence of a primary male caregiver influences a child's language skills. A language test was administered to 342 Afrikaans-speaking 4- to 9-year-olds from various socioeconomic backgrounds. The average percentile ranks for the composite language score as well as for the separate language domains of those participants with primary male caregivers was compared to the percentile ranks of those p…
Mothers' Judgement Of The Representativeness Of Their Sons' Language Samples In Relation To
CITATION: Southwood, F. & Russell, A. F. 2005. Mothers' judgement of the representativeness of their sons' language samples in relation to volume of language produced. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics, 36:85-112, doi:10.5774/36-0-14
Toward a dialect-neutral Afrikaans-medium child language assessment instrument
This article reports on the initial phase of the development of an Afrikaans-medium language assessment instrument which can differentiate between typical language development and language disorder among child speakers of all dialects of Afrikaans in a valid and reliable manner, without interference from cultural and dialectal differences. The language assessment instrument being developed is a translation and adaptation of the American Diagnosti…
No prominent works on this page.
Toward a dialect-neutral Afrikaans-medium child language assessment instrument
This article reports on the initial phase of the development of an Afrikaans-medium language assessment instrument which can differentiate between typical language development and language disorder among child speakers of all dialects of Afrikaans in a valid and reliable manner, without interference from cultural and dialectal differences. The language assessment instrument being developed is a translation and adaptation of the American Diagnosti…
The presence of a primary male caregiver affects children's language skills
This study aimed to determine whether the presence or absence of a primary male caregiver influences a child's language skills. A language test was administered to 342 Afrikaans-speaking 4- to 9-year-olds from various socioeconomic backgrounds. The average percentile ranks for the composite language score as well as for the separate language domains of those participants with primary male caregivers was compared to the percentile ranks of those p…
Mothers' Judgement Of The Representativeness Of Their Sons' Language Samples In Relation To
CITATION: Southwood, F. & Russell, A. F. 2005. Mothers' judgement of the representativeness of their sons' language samples in relation to volume of language produced. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics, 36:85-112, doi:10.5774/36-0-14
Towards a dialect-neutral assessment instrument for the language skills of Afrikaans-speaking children
The aims of the study were to establish whether there is a correlation between the socioeconomic background of Afrikaans-speaking children and their performance on a dialect-neutral language test, and to ascertain whether the allowance the test currently makes for parental education level is sufficient. The Afrikaans version of the D iagnostic E valuation of L anguage V ariation (Seymour, Roeper & de Villiers, 2005 a ) was administered to 231 Afr…
Specific language impairment as a syntax-phonology (PF) interface problem
A theoretical account of specific language impairment (SLI) – one which places the locus of the impairment at Spell-Out at the syntax-phonology interface – is proposed and then tested against utterances from Afrikaans-speaking children with SLI. Drawing on Minimalism, our account offers a unified explanation for the seemingly diverse phenomena found in the Afrikaans data: omission of certain lexical material, double articulation of other lexical …
Child language assessment and intervention in multilingual and multicultural South Africa
Research world-wide suggests that service delivery by speech-language therapists (SLTs) to bilingual children is problematic and largely unsatisfactory. In multicultural South Africa, the majority of SLTs speak either only English or only Afrikaans and English. The current state of service delivery to bilingual children, including those with first languages other than English or Afrikaans, is not known. This study was undertaken to ascertain how …
Curriculum Expectations versus Teachers’ Opinions and Practices in Teaching English in Rural Primary Schools in Uganda
The expectation of the National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC) of Uganda is that, using a thematic curriculum, learners in rural schools will learn at least 800 English words after three years of instruction in the language as a subject. This article draws on available literature on vocabulary learning by children and on results from a study conducted in four rural Ugandan primary schools. The study focused on the difficulties that learners…
Elicited Production of Part/Whole and General/ Specific Articles by Four- to Nine-Year-Old Afrikaans- and South African English-Speaking Monolinguals
This study sets out to investigate the use of articles, specifically the development of part/whole and general/specific article distinctions in Afrikaans- and English-speaking children. Previous studies comparing the development of these distinctions yielded conflicting results. In order to address this gap in the literature, a large-scale study was conducted on two languages. Two research questions were posed: (a) Does development in the article…
Children’s acquisition of negation in L1 Afrikaans
Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that originated in South Africa as a descendent of Dutch. It displays discontinuous sentential negation (SN), where negation is expressed by two phonologically identical negative particles that appear in two different positions in the sentence. The negation system is argued to be an innovation that came about through the reanalysis of a discourse-dependent (pragmatically conditioned) structure in Dutch, reinf…
The Comprehension and Production of Passive Constructions by Afrikaans and isiXhosa First Language Grade 1 Children
The acquisition of passives is well-studied in many languages, with evidence of crosslinguistic differences in the age at which passives are acquired. The aim of this study is to add to the existing knowledge of child acquisition of passives by providing data from Afrikaans and isiXhosa, two under-researched and typologically different languages spoken in South Africa. Comprehension and production data were collected from first language speakers …
Mean Length of Utterance
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 MacArth…
A Crosslinguistic Study of Gesture and Lexical Development in South African Infants
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 evid…
Is home environment predictive of early grammar development
Research shows that children’s home environment (e.g., the composition of their household and the resources available in it) has an impact on children’s language development. However, this research has mostly been conducted among English speakers from the minority world and has often only considered vocabulary size. This exploratory study investigated whether home environment factors are predictive of grammar development in Afrikaans-speaking ( n…
Instrument adaptation for measuring early child language development across multilingual and sociocultural diverse settings
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…
Language Development and Disorders (13 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Linguistics (9 works) · Developmental psychology (6 works) · Language development (6 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Language acquisition (4 works) · Mathematics education (4 works) · Population (4 works)