Multilingual assessment of early child development: Analyses from repeated observations of children in Kenya

Abstract

In many low‐ and middle‐income countries, young children learn a mother tongue or indigenous language at home before entering the formal education system where they will need to understand and speak a country's official language(s). Thus, assessments of children before school age, conducted in a nation's official language, may not fully reflect a child's development, underscoring the importance of test translation and adaptation. To examine differences in vocabulary development by language of assessment, we adapted and validated instruments to measure developmental outcomes, including expressive and receptive vocabulary. We assessed 505 2‐to‐6‐year‐old children in rural communities in Western Kenya with comparable vocabulary tests in three languages: Luo (the local language or mother tongue), Swahili, and English (official languages) at two time points, 5–6 weeks apart, between September 2015 and October 2016. Younger children responded to the expressive vocabulary measure exclusively in Luo (44%–59% of 2‐to‐4‐year‐olds) much more frequently than did older children (20%–21% of 5‐to‐6‐year‐olds). Baseline receptive vocabulary scores in Luo (β = 0.26, SE = 0.05, p < 0.001) and Swahili (β = 0.10, SE = 0.05, p = 0.032) were strongly associated with receptive vocabulary in English at follow‐up, even after controlling for English vocabulary at baseline. Parental Luo literacy at baseline (β = 0.11, SE = 0.05, p = 0.045) was associated with child English vocabulary at follow‐up, while parental English literacy at baseline was not. Our findings suggest that multilingual testing is essential to understanding the developmental environment and cognitive growth of multilingual children.

Development and evaluation of the Ingwavuma receptive vocabulary test: A tool for assessing receptive vocabulary in isiZulu-speaking preschool children

“…Challenges such as translations influencing sensitivity (Knauer, Karinger, Jakiela, Ozia, & Fernald, 2019 ), bias and limited comparison to norms (Weber, Fernald, Galasso, & Ratsifandrihamanana, 2015 ) experienced in test adaptations justify the need to develop local tests especially for isiZulu, the most widely spoken South African language. The aim of our study was to develop a one-word receptive vocabulary test appropriate for screening and diagnosis of isiZulu-speaking preschool children.…”

Development and initial validation of productive vocabulary tests for isiZulu, Siswati and English in South Africa

“…Thus, while multilingual vocabulary assessment is contextually appropriate, the results do not necessarily reflect whether a child has developed adequate vocabulary in each individual language to support reading. Knauer et al (2019) also developed a multilingual productive vocabulary test. They found that baseline performance on their test predicted receptive vocabulary in English, Kiswahili, and Luo, and multilingual productive vocabulary measured five weeks later.…”

Introduction to special issue on global child development studies

“…Numerous studies included in this issue present adaptation and/ or testing of behavioral and neuroimaging measures to ensure that these are locally appropriate, feasible, and acceptable for measurement of children's behavioral (Milosavljevic et al, ; Obradović et al, ; Willoughby, Piper, Oyanga, & Merseth, ), language (Dulay, Cheung, & McBride, ; Jasińska, Wolf, Jukes, & Dubeck, ; Knauer, Kariger, Jakiela, Ozier, & Fernald, ; Lervåg, Dolean, Tincas, & Melby‐Lervåg, ), and neural development (Lloyd‐Fox et al, ; Perdue et al, ; Pyykkö et al, ; Turesky et al, ; Wijeakumar, Kumar, M. Delgado Reyes, Tiwari, & Spencer, ). Milosavljevic et al (), for example, test the adaptation of the Mullen Scales of Early Learning in the Gambia and cast light on developmental patterns in children aged 5–24 months.…”

“…Increased attention to biological embedding of early experience, children's emotional outcomes, and longitudinal investigation of developmental changes are positive and welcome trends in global child research. Knauer et al () assess interrelations between language skills across languages in multilingual children in Kenya.…”

“…Numerous studies included in this issue present adaptation and/ or testing of behavioral and neuroimaging measures to ensure that these are locally appropriate, feasible, and acceptable for measurement of children's behavioral (Milosavljevic et al, 2019;Obradović et al, 2019;Willoughby, Piper, Oyanga, & Merseth, 2019), language (Dulay, Cheung, & McBride, 2019;Jasińska, Wolf, Jukes, & Dubeck, 2019;Knauer, Kariger, Jakiela, Ozier, & Fernald, 2019;Lervåg, Dolean, Tincas, & Melby-Lervåg, 2019), and neural develop- (Cook et al, 2019). Many of these factors undermine or promote child development in similar ways in low-, middle-, and high-income countries.…”