The current study examines the contribution of racial congruence on young children's speech and language production to determine if African American children produce more or different language with an African American assessor, as opposed to a White assessor. Participants for the current study were selected from a larger group of children…

African American English (AAE)-speaking children's ability to judge the grammaticality of sentences was evaluated by their clinical status and grammatical structure. The study originated from a need to understand more about the tense and agreement systems of AAE speakers with specific language impairment (SLI) relative to their typically…

Purpose: Both fictional oral narrative and expository oral discourse skills are critical language competencies that support children's academic success. Few studies, however, have examined African American children's microstructure performance across these genres. To address this gap in the literature, the study compared African American…

Purpose: In this mixed-methods study, we address two aims. First, we examine the impact of language variation on the ratings of children's narrative language. Second, we identify participants' ideologies related to narrative language and language variation. Method: Forty adults listened to and rated six Black second-grade children on the quality…

This qualitative study explores the transition to kindergarten special education of four Somali autistic children in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This dissertation answers a single, two-part research question: What aspects of the transition to kindergarten process do stakeholders find facilitate the transition process? What parts of the transition do…

Three aspects of cognition (fluid intelligence, executive functioning, and crystallized intelligence) in pre-K were examined as predictors of math and reading achievement in kindergarten among an economically diverse sample of 198 African American children. From a variable-centered perspective, confirmatory factor analyses revealed that the three…

Drawing on translanguaging and raciolinguistics frameworks in an ethnographic case study, this article contextualizes how young Black American children engage in rich literacy practices to validate their cultural and linguistic identities in an elementary, two-way immersion bilingual program. Findings demonstrated that despite teachers' perceived…

A growing number of researchers are examining how teacher-student relationships contribute to child and adolescent development. Much of this work is based on two distinct theoretical perspectives: social support and attachment. The current study investigates the importance of teacher-student relationships from each of these perspectives among…

Children's decisions regarding the allocation of societal resources in the context of preexisting inequalities were investigated. African American and European American children ages 5 to 6 years (n = 91) and 10 to 11 years (n = 94) judged the acceptability of a medical resource inequality on the basis of race, allocated medical supplies,…