CHAPTER 6 DISCUSSION
6.4 The Effect of SES and Individual Factors .1 Area
To ‘butjila’: a type of greeting action specific to the Kalanga culture, which can be added to Category A as part of a general item for greeting, as there is an item for saying farewell but not for any type of greeting.
To snap their fingers when they hear a song: this can be added to Category B with the item for dancing
To put clothes in water pretending to wash them: this can be added to Category E with the item for washing dishes
To pour water or sand into a container and stir pretending to cook: this can be added to Category E of pretending to be an adult
6.4 The Effect of SES and Individual Factors
9.3 years, i.e., they have completed primary school but have not completed the Junior Secondary Examination. Of these eight parents, seven of them were from the peri-urban group. On the other hand, there were six participants who indicated that they had an income within the top two tax brackets i.e., more than BWP 108, 001.00. Four of these six
participants were from the peri-urban group, including the only participant within the highest tax bracket. Therefore, most of the participants with the lowest education levels as well as most of the participants with the highest income were both from the peri-urban group.
This means that to get a better idea of the impact that the urban/peri-urban/rural divide has on language development, future studies need to include populations from rural areas deeper in the country. Other SES indicators are compounded by living in a deep rural area, such as a lack of access to higher quality education and higher paying jobs.
6.4.2 Gender
There was an unbalanced distribution of males and females in the sample. Therefore, it was not surprising that there was no statistically significant difference found between the language scores of boys and girls. However, for both lexical comprehension and production (see Figures 5.2.m and 5.2.n respectively), there was a trend found of females progressing faster than males. Although it is generally believed that females mature faster than males, studies on language abilities are inconclusive on there being such a difference. With regards to gestures, Fenson et. al. (1994) found that the category with the most significant gender difference was ‘pretending to be a parent’, with females having the advantage. During the data collection of this study, caregivers of male children would often get to this category and insist that, based on the instructions, they cannot complete the section. This attitude is based on the cultural beliefs and notions of gender roles in society. Women are the caregivers and men do not nurture small children, therefore female children would emulate this behaviour and not boys.
6.4.3 Maternal education
Only five of the 28 mothers in this sample had a low level of education, i.e., below the national average of 9.3 years. Therefore, it is not surprising that there was not a significant
difference found based on maternal education. A recent study in South Africa by Southwood et. al. (2021) also found no correlation between maternal education and lexical ability in children below three years. Some studies have used maternal education as a sole proxy for SES because it is more stable than variables such as income, and because it is less
controversial to measure (see Dollaghan et. al., 1999). However, this did not prove as successful in the setting of the present study.
Southwood and colleagues suggested that one of the reasons maternal education did not correlate with vocabulary, is because in many African households, childcare is often a
responsibility shared amongst older female relatives and not just the child’s mother alone. In the present study, about a third of the children were being taken care of by someone other than their mother. Grandmothers, an older female cousin, childminders and a creche were the main caregivers of nine of the children in this study. As Southwood et. al. (2021) points out,
“In cases where a female other than the mother provides the majority of the childcare,
maternal level of education might be less relevant than primary caregiver level of education.”
(p. 12)
Nevertheless, maternal education is an important indicator of SES (Hauser, 1994). In this sample, four of the five mothers with lower levels of education were also living in the peri-urban area, and they all had an income below the national average and in the lowest tax bracket. Furthermore, nine of the 10 participants who indicated that the mother had tertiary level education, also indicated that they had an income above the national average and more than half of them lived within the city. Thus, future studies should incorporate maternal education as a variable of SES, bearing in mind the difference in education levels of Western and non-Western populations. For instance, Fernald, Marchman, & Weisleder (2013), had an average maternal education of 13.7 years for their group with a low SES, whereas only 28.8%
of Botswana’s population has tertiary level education or more than 12 years of schooling, and they are most probably not from a low SES background. In Sub-Saharan Africa, a correlation was found only with mothers who had a primary level of education (Vogt, Mastin, &
Aussems, 2015), thus this may be a better distinction to follow for future studies in a similar socio-cultural setting.
6.4.4 Health issues
With regards to health-related issues, there were six children in the sample who were born before 36 weeks and/or weighing under 2.5kg. There were also three children who were indicated to have had an ear infection. Finally, there were four infants who had one or more family members with a speech-hearing difficulty. None of these health factors were shown to have a statistically significant correlation to vocabulary or gesture scores.
Bradley & Corwyn (2002) found that the relation of health and child development is more prevalent in children from low SES backgrounds. However, as discussed earlier, there was great variation of SES markers of participants in this study, and it was not well balanced between low and mid-SES. Thus, it may be that there was not a difference in scores for children with health issues because their health issues were not compounded by a low SES background.
6.4.5 Exposure to other languages
In a recent study, Germain, Gonzalez-Barrero & Byers-Heinlein (2020) compared the gesture acquisition of 14-month-old infants in three language groups. The first group was monolingual French or English infants, the second was infants exposed to a second language, and lastly bilingual French and English infants who heard both languages for more than 25%
of the time. They found that there was no statistically significant difference between the three groups. However, there were slight differences in the raw gesture scores of the three groups.
The monolingual group had the lowest gesture scores for the subcategory A - First Communicative Gestures, while the bilingual group had the lowest gesture scores for the combination of subcategories C, D and E10.
In the present study, the infants that were exposed to a second language for more than 25% of the day had lower scores than the monolingual group across the gesture section (see Figure 5.3.d). This group is comparable to the bilingual group in the study by Germain and
10 Germain and colleagues did not compare scores for subcategory B - Games and routines, due to the major
differences between the items in the two languages.
colleagues, and these results are similar to those they found for the subcategory First Communicative Gestures.
Germain et al. suggest reasons why their original hypothesis, that bilingual infants would gesture more than their monolingual counterparts, was not reflected in their results, which may be applicable to the present study. One suggestion was that infants with richer expressive vocabularies in more than one language, experience a higher cognitive load than their monolingual counterparts. Relative to monolinguals, they may be experiencing more language competition and thus not be producing as many gestures.
Another possibility is that the development of gestures is intrinsically related to the development of vocabulary. Although it was not statistically significant, the vocabulary scores of the monolingual children in this cohort were also higher than that of the children with high exposure to other languages (see Figures 5.2.q and 5.2.r for receptive and
expressive vocabulary respectively). It is generally believed that children acquiring more than one language develop vocabulary at a slower rate than monolingual children (Bialystok, Luk, Peets & Sujin, 2010), which these findings seem to support. If the development of gesture is inherently linked to that of vocabulary, then it would follow that a slower rate of acquisition in one mode of language means the same for the other mode. Exploring this link between gesture and vocabulary could be an important direction for future research, as well as the development patterns of gesture in children exposed to or acquiring a second language.