First Ten Words Expressed By Children Acquiring Ewe From 12- 18 Months

ABSTRACT

Background: Language is a social tool which shows the collective thinking of people in a particular area. Language acquisition is an important aspect of human development. Children acquire language to communicate with their surroundings. There has been a wide research conducted on first language acquisition in the world but not so many in Sub- Saharan Africa. There have not been a lot of researches conducted on the first words acquisition of children in Ghana. In a quest to develop language assessment tools to meet the Ghanaian context, this research was conducted to find out the ten of first words of children acquiring Ewe between the ages of 12-18 months. Aim: The aim of this study was to find ten of the first words expressed by children acquiring Ewe. Method: A cross-sectional mixed study on 69 children acquiring Ewe from the ages of 12-18 months in 3 rural areas in the Keta Municipality of the Volta Region. The study was conducted from April to June 2018. Mothers and caregivers responded to a questionnaire, a word checklist and completed a word record form by the help of the researcher. Data was analyzed using a statistical software SPSS version 20. Results: The 69 children had 36 words in common. Out of these, 17 of the words are in the semantic category based on the MacArthur Bates Communication Development Inventories (MBCDI). The MBCDI was used because it is a worldwide accepted communication development inventory to know the levels of language and speech development of children. v The occupations of mothers and caregivers impacted the kind of words the children said as first words. Children who spend much time with their mothers and grandmothers had a lot of words in their corpus. Conclusion: The children had 36 Ewe words in common. Out of these words, ten of the first words are in the category of nouns. This confirms the noun bias in the first words acquisition stated in other studies. This is an exploratory study and there is enough room to improve this current study