Purpose: Nonword repetition (NWR) has been proposed as a culturally and linguistically fair measure of children's language abilities that is useful for the identification of specific language impairment (SLI). However, Moyle, Heilmann, and Finneran (2014) suggested that the density of a child's nonmainstream forms also influences NWR in ways that…

The many permutations of spoken English have called for an interrogation into the notions of 'standard English' and 'native accents'. Despite their problematic nature, these terms remain commonly used, and familiarity with 'standard', inner-circle varieties of English is typical among L2 English speakers, differences in education and language…

This study sheds light on the socio-economic factors determining the (re)location of sociolinguistic prestige in postcolonial environments. It uses the case of Namibia, an ethnolinguistically diverse African country that replaced Afrikaans -- an established lingua franca -- with English as its official language to weaken the hold of the formerly…

Purpose: Some pronunciation patterns that are normal in 1 dialect might represent an error in another dialect (i.e., [ko(upsilon)l] for "cold," which is typical in African American English [AAE] but an error in many other dialects of English). This study examined whether trained speech-language pathologists and untrained listeners…

This study examined the effect of dialect variation on children's spelling by using devoicing of final /d/ in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a test case. In line with the linguistic interference hypothesis, African American 6-year-olds were significantly poorer at spelling the final "d" of words such as "salad"…

This article describes the use of African American English (AAE) in the written and oral language of African American adolescents who struggle with writing. Written and oral language samples of 22 African American 10th-grade students were transcribed, analyzed, and coded for AAE, grammatical errors, spelling errors, and punctuation errors. Four…

Explores the distribution of /ai/ monophthongization in African-American and European-American speakers in Memphis, Tennessee. Presents evidence of extensive glide weakening in the African-American community in Memphis and compares it to the degree and contexts of glide weakening in the European-American community. (Author/VWL)

Presents evidence that Detroit African Americans are participating in a recent sound change that is typically associated with some White but not African American varieties in the American South. Reports a leveling pattern in which /ai/ monothongization has expanded to the salient pre-voiceless context in Detroit African American English (AAE).…

Investigated African American Vernacular English dialect features in the midwestern community of Davenport, Iowa, and compared them to those reported by Pollock and Berni (1997) for Memphis, Tennessee--specifically productions of vocalic and postvocalic /r/ across African-American speakers from Davenport and Memphis. (Author/VWL)

Three studies of the relationship of Black English (BE) pronunciation to spelling performance are reported in this document. The first study explored a large number of BE pronunciation features. The second included control features that do not have differing pronunciations in BE and standard English (SE). The third examined final consonant…

To determine whether black children who speak a nonstandard dialect have difficulty in spelling because of the dialect features of their vocabulary, spelling tests were administered to 66 black English-speaking children in the first, second, and third grades. The results indicated that children who spoke black dialect exhibited spelling…

Through taped interviews, this study investigated the pronunciation of certain consonants in a rural, deep south county in the South Georgia-North Florida area. The informants came from three groups: lower socioeconomic status (LSES) second graders, LSES senior high students, and teachers in the public schools. Some of the findings showed that…

Second-grade Black children who speak Black English (BE) were compared with Black and White age peers who speak Standard English (SE) on auditory sound blending and word recognition tasks presented in both BE and SE form. BE speakers were bidialectal and performed best on SE materials in a school situation. (Author/RD)

A study investigated the degree to which the pronunciation of English words in the child's home environment affected the acquisition or discrimination of phonological and orthographic correspondences of standard written English. Subjects were low-socioeconomic-status, inner-city African American kindergarten, first-, and second-grade students, who…

This study develops specific facts about the nature of the Black English "lingua franca" which formed on the American eastern seaboard in the last half of the eighteenth century. Accepting an assumption that American English of this period was levelling into a "koine," this investigation attempts to characterize the consonant loss and substitution…