Based on many years of painstaking fieldwork by the first author, this paper adapts an instrument developed in Dr. Friend’s laboratory at SDSU, the Computerized Comprehension Task (CCT) to two new languages (Argentinian-Spanish and Qom) and extends the upward range of assessment from two to seven years of age. The ability to conduct the assessment on a tablet permitted researchers to travel to remote villages to conduct assessments and acquire data on each of these languages. Qom is an Indigenous language spoken in rural northern Argentina that is recognized as “definitely endangered.” We developed our assessments to be culturally relevant within the Qom community and measured relative receptive vocabulary size and reaction time across Argentinian-Spanish and Qom in Indigenous bilingual children from three to seven years of age. This allowed us to assess the extent to which children maintain their Indigenous heritage language in the face of majority language incursion at school and in other settings. What we found was a significant decline in the number of Qom words that children could accurately identify and the speed with which they could identify them beginning around the time children enter school. These findings issue a clear imperative for improving bilingual education policy to preserve endangered Indigenous languages in Argentina.
Rosemberg, C.R., Ojea, G., Alam, F., Garber, L., Stein, A., de Benedictus, C., Jackson-Maldonado, D., and Friend, M. (2024).
Assessment of vocabulary comprehension in Bilingual Qom – Spanish Indigenous children in Northern Argentina: Evidence for education, language preservation, and psycholinguistic theory, Special issue: Social and cultural contexts where multilingualism interacts with development Development, 71