Working towards Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Speech Assessments for South African Children: A Xhosa Case Study

There is a lack of culturally and linguistically appropriate tools for assessing the speech and language development of South African infants and toddlers, particularly those who speak southern African Bantu languages. This article sets out to describe our experiences of the pre-pilot phase of the Xhosa adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs). To this end, a background to the CDIs is provided, as well as discussion on biases in assessments. Data informing this discussion is drawn from observations of the spontaneous speech and gestures of Xhosa-speaking toddlers in the 16–30 month age group in both rural and urban areas, as well as focus groups and individual interviews with mothers and professional caregivers of Xhosa-speaking toddlers.