Purpose: This research explored mechanisms of vowel variation in African American English by comparing 2 geographically distant groups of African American and White American English speakers for participation in the African American Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift. Method: Thirty-two male (African American: n = 16, White American controls: n =…

Purpose: This study explored how typically developing 1st grade African American English (AAE) speakers differ from mainstream American English (MAE) speakers in the completion of 2 common phonological awareness tasks (rhyming and phoneme segmentation) when the stimulus items were consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant (CVCC) words and nonwords.…

Investigates the extent to which users of Black South African English (BSAE) command the vowel system of English. One mother tongue speaker each of English, Southern Sotho, and Zulu read a set of stimulus words representing various monothong contrasts in standard South African English. Results are discussed in relation to the question of whether…

This study examined whether African-American children (n=10; ages 4-9) who deleted final consonants marked the presence of those consonants in some fashion. Results indicated that the children produced longer vowels preceding "deleted" voiced final consonants, suggesting that the children had knowledge of the final consonants perceived…