The narrative abilities of 4-year-old monolingual Afrikaans- and Xhosa-speaking children from low socio-economic status environments in South Africa

Abstract

Children’s language, literacy, and narrative development are influenced by their home and social environments. Early language experiences are a key factor in the disparities in language development associated with low socio-economic status (SES). Narrative assessments offer clinicians valuable insights into a child’s language and conceptual development, as well as their understanding of story structure. Including children from diverse socio-economic backgrounds in study samples helps researchers identify authentic peer groups and understand typical performance within subgroups of multilingual children. In this study, we examined the narratives of monolingual Afrikaans- (n=116) and Xhosa-speaking (n=112) children, aged 4-5 years, from low SES communities in South Africa. Narratives were collected using the Cat and Dog stories from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) in the story generation mode. We first provide descriptive results on their performance in story structure and comprehension, focusing on the macrostructural complexity of their MAIN narratives. We then compare our results with previous MAIN studies that investigated the same age group and elicitation mode. Finally, we discuss the differences between our language groups, the insights gained from our findings and offer recommendations for future research.