The core vocabulary of South African Afrikaans-speaking preschoolers without disabilities

Abstract

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) can enable individuals with little or no functional speech to communicate functionally in a variety of communicative contexts. Aided AAC systems for individuals who are not (yet) literate require that the vocabulary for the system be preselected. This requires choosing a limited number of words from a pool of all possibilities for inclusion in the system. Core vocabulary lists have been proposed and used as one source for selecting words for an aided AAC system. By including the most commonly and most frequently used words in an AAC system, access to novel utterance generation can be facilitated. This in turn can enable communication across contexts and partners. South Africa has approximately 6.85 million Afrikaans first language speakers. Since no core vocabulary list has to date been determined for Afrikaans preschoolers, the goal of this study

was to identify the words used most frequently and commonly by South African Afrikaans- speaking preschoolers without disabilities.

Spontaneous speech samples were collected from 12 Afrikaans-speaking preschool children without disabilities. The samples were recorded during regular preschool activities by means of small body-worn audio-recording devices. The recordings samples were transcribed and analysed to determine the number of different words used, the frequency with which each word was used, as well as the commonality of word use among the 12 participants. For a word to form part of the core vocabulary list, two criteria had to be met, namely a frequency score of equal to or more than 0.5‰, and a commonality score of six (implying that at least 50% of the participants used this word). This led to the establishment of an Afrikaans core vocabulary list of 239 words accounting for 79.4% of words used in the entire speech sample that was collected. This core vocabulary was further described according to parts of speech. The characteristics of the Afrikaans core vocabulary appear to be similar to those found in previous core vocabulary studies, as a relatively small set of words was found to represent a large proportion of speech. The results of the study can be used to guide the vocabulary selection process for children from an Afrikaans language background who require AAC.