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.
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.
