Introduction:
Bilinguals are defined as those who use two (or more) languages in one's routine life, without knowing two or more languages equally well and optimally (1).Bilinguals can be categorized into sequential and simultaneous depending on age and manner of language acquisition (2). Simultaneous bilinguals are those who acquire two languages from infancy. Sequential bilinguals are those who are exposed to and acquire one language first and learn the second language after obtaining some competence in the first (2). One amongst the several tasks to assess the vocabulary of an individual is verbal fluency. It is a free naming, time dependent task, which requires the participant to name as many exemplars as possible from a particular category (semantic fluency) or beginning from a particular letter (phonemic fluency) in 60 seconds time frame. Verbal fluency is a commonly used measure in monolingual (3) and bilingual adults. Research involving verbal fluency usage in bilingual children, is very sparse (4-5). A very meagre number of studies have been done comparing the performance of children from different socio economic status (6-7).
No effect of socio economic status (SES) on animal fluency task was reported by Prigatano, Gray, and Lomay (6) based on their study among 200 minority background (Hispanic) with low socio economic status (LSES) children (grades I to VIII). Contrary to this finding, Filipetti (7) reported a significant difference in the total number of words produced in the verbal fluency task between low SES and middle SES especially in older group. Reduced performance in children from low socio economic status as compared to middle socioeconomic status for tasks of language and cognitive tasks are also reported by Farah et al. (8)
Lee (9) conducted a study on 51 five year old Cantonese- English bilingual children from high and low socio economic status. The task of semantic fluency (animals, drinks, food, cars) and phonemic fluency (F, M, P) was done. They concluded that the performance of children in verbal fluency in Cantonese was similar across the high and low socio economic status. However children with high socio economic status performed better than children from low socio economic status in English. They concluded that this difference in performance could be attributed to several factors such as language use at home, amount of reading time in English and English learning time at preschool.
Overall, very few studies have reported on semantic fluency performance among bilingual children on the basis of socioeconomic status. The review of existing literature shows that there is no common consensus regarding the effect of SES on verbal fluency production in bilingual population. There has not been any research done till date which considers the effect of the socio economic status on the semantic fluency development in Kannada- English sequential bilingual children.
Kannada is a Dravidian language, spoken in South India, which has agglutinate morphology, where there is no variability in morphemes between different contexts and the boundaries of these morphemes is easily identifiable (10) as compared to English which has an isolate morphology in which all morphemes are free, with fixed word order. There are approximately 255 million bilinguals and 87.5 million multilinguals in India. The current study therefore aims at investigating the effect of socio-economic status (middle and low socioeconomic status) on semantic fluency performance in Kannada- English sequential bilingual children.
Method
Using a cross sectional study design, semantic fluency was tested in school aged children. Fifty, 3rd standard Kannada – English sequential bilingual children were recruited from two government schools with Kannada as the medium of instruction (low socio economic status group, n=20) and three private schools with English as a medium of instruction (middle socio economic group, n=30). Children were given a task of animal fluency where they were instructed to name as many animals as possible in time duration of 1 minute. The testing was done in Kannada as well as English and a time gap of 1 week was given between the testing of both the languages to avoid the effect of cross language interference.
Children were divided into two groups based on their socio economic status (according to their parental occupation) with group I as low socio economic status (LSES) and group II as middle socio economic status group (MSES). The outcome measure selected for the study was the Total number of correct words (TNCW), which is the total number of correct word production excluding the erroneous responses. Example: if the production is “cow, cat, dog, goat, cow” then the TNCW is 4. The total number of correct words was estimated across two groups and two languages (Kannada & English). Statistical analysis included descriptive statistics (Mean and SD) and Poisson’s regression to estimate mean ratio of the scores as the data was a count data. The statistical analysis was done using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 15.0 for windows (Chicago, Inc.). A ‘p’ value of less than 0.05 was considered to be statistically significant.
Results & Discussion
The objectives of the study were to compare performance on semantic fluency task in typically developing Kannada- English sequential bilingual children from middle and low socio economic status (LSES and MSES). Table 1 depicts the descriptive statistics of mean and standard deviation of Total number of correct words produced by LSES and MSES group across L1 (Kannada) and L2 (English).
| Table 1: Mean ratio comparing total number of correct word production in LSES versus MSES 3rd standard children |
| Category |
Group |
p Value |
Mean ratio |
Confidence interval (95%) |
AL1 |
I |
0.311 |
0.901 |
0.737,1.102 |
|
II |
- |
1 |
- |
AL2 |
I |
0.000 |
0.345 |
0.270,0.441 |
|
II |
- |
1 |
|
Descriptive statistics using mean and standard deviation revealed greater scores for middle socioeconomic status as compared to low socioeconomic status in both the languages. However this difference was noted to be greater in second language (English) as compared to Kannada.
 |
Graph 1: Mean scores of total number of words produced in LSES and MSES (Group I: LSES and Group II: MSES) |
Poison’s regression was done to check for the accuracy of the results and also for the comparison of production in LSES and MSES group for animal fluency task. The results indicated that there was a mean ratio of 0.901 of group I in comparison to group II which was maintained as the reference group in L1. This indicates that the performance of group I is poorer to that of the group II. This difference in score was however not statistically significant (p=0.311). In L2, there was a significant increase in the total number of words produced by group II than group I (p= 0.000). A mean ratio of 0.345 was observed in group I with group II kept as reference, indicating that the MSES group outperformed the LSES group in English.
The current study finding of better performance in MSES as compared to LSES are in consonance with earlier research (7, 9). This decrease in scores in children from a low socio economic background could be attributed to the impoverished educational experience, reduced exposure to reading and due to reduced communicational interactions between the child and parent. Another reason that could be attributed for the reduced word production in LSES group in L2 could be due to the reduced exposure to the language as the medium of instruction in schools and the language commonly used for interaction is Kannada.
Thus the current study findings indicate a significant difference in scores on the animal fluency task in the LSES group in comparison to MSES. This difference could be due to the lack of exposure to the language or due to the impoverished educational experience. In the context of limited literature evidence on effects of bilingualism and socio economic status on verbal fluency in Indian context, present study adds on to the existing knowledge of semantic fluency in bilingual children. Future studies could be done on a larger population employing the phonemic as well as semantic fluency tasks.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank all the school authorities and the participants for their participation in this study.
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