Child-Directed Speech in Rural and Urban Households in a Low-SES Afrikaans-Speaking Community in South Africa

Most studies on child language acquisition occur in the minority world (countries which make up the minority of the world's population). Their findings are not generalizable to majority-world contexts, where the majority of the world's population lives. The limited research in the latter contexts reveals the presence of differing child language socialization practices, not generalizable across Global South contexts, and that socio-economic status (SES) and geographic location (rural/urban) can affect these practices. This study examined the language input to 5-month-olds in a low-SES, Afrikaans-speaking community in South Africa. Half of the 10 participating households were urban-situated and half rural-situated. Each home had a 1-h video recording of household members interacting naturally with and around the infant; these recordings were transcribed and coded in ELAN. The amount of child-directed speech (CDS) and number of (a) different utterance types, and (b) instances of contingent speech were determined. CDS comprised 76% of all utterances. Although there were no significant differences between urban and rural households when all CDS was considered collectively, more questions were directed at rural than urban infants, and more instances of speaking on behalf of the child occurred in the case of rural infants: in each recording, caregivers used “typical” CDS features (higher pitch, repetition, etc.) to speak in the first person but on behalf of infants, an infrequently reported phenomenon in CDS research. The types and number of utterances and the amount of CDS used did not pattern as reported by scholars for other low-SES, majority-world communities.