Examining Noun Bias in the Vocabulary Development of Xitsonga-Speaking Children Aged 16 to 32 Months

Studies of early lexical development have examined children’s vocabulary composition with the aim of quantifying early preference in the acquisition of nouns, predicates (verbs, adjectives, and adverbs), and closed-class/function words. Their findings show that a noun bias is common, suggesting it could be a universal aspect of early language development. However, only a small percentage of the world’s languages have been investigated. This paper examines whether children acquiring Xitsonga, a Bantu language spoken in Southern Africa, exhibit a noun bias in their early acquisition of lexical items. Data were collected from caregivers of 95 monolingual Xitsonga-speaking children aged 16 to 32 months in Limpopo Province, South Africa, using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI) adapted for Xitsonga. Xitsonga-speaking children’s vocabularies showed a positive noun bias in relation to predicates and function words, similar to findings for most languages. However, separating predicates into verbs and adjectives showed that while there is still an early noun bias, children begin to favour verbs when their vocabularies exceed 400 words. The proportion of nouns and verbs aligns with findings for other Bantu languages, suggesting that languages that share typological similarities may have similar trajectories in early acquisition of lexical categories.