The potential of speech technology to improve educational outcomes has been a topic of great interest in recent years. For example, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems could be employed to provide kindergarten-aged children with real-time feedback on their literacy and pronunciation as they practice reading aloud. Within these systems,…

The purpose of this study was to examine Cajun English (CE)-speaking children's marking of infinitival TO. To do this, CE-speaking children's marking of infinitival TO was compared to the marking of infinitival TO by Southern White English (SWE)- and African American English (AAE)-speaking children. Marking of infinitival TO also was examined as a…

Purpose: We compared outcomes from 2 measures of language ability in children who displayed a range of dialect variation: 1 using features that do not contrast between mainstream American English (MAE) and nonmainstream dialects (NMAE), and 1 using contrastive features. We investigated how modified scoring procedures affected the diagnostic…

Purpose: As follow-up to a previous study of probes, we evaluated the marking of tense and agreement (T/A) in language samples by children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing controls in African American English (AAE) and Southern White English (SWE) while also examining the clinical utility of different scoring…

Purpose: We compared teacher ratings as measured by the Teacher Rating of Oral Language and Literacy (TROLL; Dickinson, McCabe, & Sprague, 2001, 2003) and Children's Communication Checklist-Second Edition (CCC-2; Bishop, 2006) to 2 established screeners, the Part II of the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation-Screening Test (DELV-ST-II;…

The achievement gaps between poor and more affluent students are persistent and chronic, as many students living in poverty are also members of more isolated communities where dialects such as African American English and Southern Vernacular English are often spoken. Non-mainstream dialect use is associated with weaker literacy achievement. The…

Purpose: The current meta-analysis examines recent empirical research studies that have investigated relations among dialect use and the development and achievement of reading, spelling, and writing skills. Method: Studies published between 1998 and 2014 were selected if they: (a) included participants who were in Grades K-6 and were typically…

Reading comprehension, defined as the active extraction and construction of meaning from all kinds of text, requires children to fluently decode and understand what they are reading. Basic processes underlying reading comprehension are complex and call on the oral language system and a conscious understanding of this system, i.e., metalinguistic…