Aspects of the acquisition of Afrikaans syntax

Abstract

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.