Séminaire Axe 3 : Linguistic aspects on lexical acquisition

Ramona Kunene Nicolas,
Maitresse de Conference à l’Université de Witwatersrand (Wits University), Linguistics Department, Johannesburg, South Africa.

 This talk seeks to examine how children speakers of a Bantu language, isiZulu develop their lexical competencies in early child acquisition. Existing literature uses the Child Directed Inventory (CDI) to track how lexical acquisition occurs. The frequency of input has a large input on what a child learns first.
 
Most literature does not discuss the effect of how the linguistic structure of a language can have an impact on how the developmental trajectory. The study of lesser-studied languages, such as Bantu languages, further provides much-needed information on the cognitive issues at work before a child is a competent speaker. This talk seeks to discuss the interplay between linguistic theory, linguistic structure and acquisition in Bantu language development and looks at how this may differ from existing literature of languages such as the French or Italian language.