Purpose: Syntax provides critical support for both academic success and linguistic growth, yet it has not been a focus of language research in school-age African American children. This study examines complex syntax performance of African American children in second through fifth grades. Method: The current study explores the syntactic…

This research examined how linguistic differences between African American English (AAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE) impact how children process sentences and learn new information. The central hypothesis of this dissertation is that these linguistic differences adversely impact how AAE-speaking children use contrastive inflectional verb…

Purpose: The goal of the current study was to examine the impact of dialect density on the growth of oral language and reading skills in a sample of African American English (AAE)-speaking children reared in urban communities. Method: Eight hundred thirty-five African American children in first through fifth grades participated. Using an…

Purpose: We examined language samples of young children learning African American English (AAE) to determine if and when their use of auxiliaries shows dialect-universal and dialect-specific effects. Method: The data were longitudinal language samples obtained from two children, ages 18 to 36 months, and three children, ages 33 to 51 months.…

Purpose: This study investigated the fictional narrative performance of school-age African American children across 3 elicitation contexts that differed in the type of visual stimulus presented. Method: A total of 54 children in Grades 2 through 5 produced narratives across 3 different visual conditions: no visual, picture sequence, and single…

African Americans students, who use African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in the academic setting, receive negative misconceptions by English educators. Negative teacher attitudes might cause African American students to lack commitment to learning. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to examine whether English teachers…

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…

African American English has a rich oral tradition, with identifiable features across all 5 systems of language--phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. This is an investigation of the extent to which pragmatic features of African American oral storytelling traditions are apparent in the written stories of African American…

Purpose: Overt marking of "BE" in nonmainstream adult dialects of English is influenced by a number of linguistic constraints, including the structure's person, number, tense, contractibility, and grammatical function. In the current study, the authors examined the effects of these constraints on overt marking of "BE" in…

Purpose: To investigate children's performance on a fast mapping task. Possible effects across age, dialect group, and clinical status were explored. Method: Participants between the ages of 4 and 9 saw a series of pictured events and heard novel verbs. The novel verbs were in intransitive, transitive, dative, and complement syntactic frames or…

Purpose: The well-known decline in the use of African American English (AAE) features by groups of school-aged AAE-speaking children was reexamined for patterns of overt-, zero-, and mixed-marking for individual features and individual speakers. Methods: Seven hundred twenty-nine typically developing children between the ages of 4 and 12--511…

This dissertation evaluates the relationship between African American English and White Vernacular English as spoken in a small rural town in western North Carolina for consistencies in vowel production by group membership and for participation in the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS), a vowel rotation currently occurring in the Southern United States. A…

Purpose: The validity of the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn; Scarborough, 1990) for children who speak African American English (AAE) was evaluated by conducting an item analysis and a comparison of the children's scores as a function of their maternal education level, nonmainstream dialect density, age, and clinical status. Method: The data…

Purpose: This study explored the type and adequacy of cohesive devices that are produced by school-age children who use African American English (AAE). Method: The language samples of 33 African American children, ages 7, 9, and 11 years, were transcribed, analyzed, and coded for AAE use and cohesive adequacy (e.g., personal reference,…

Purpose: To evaluate the role of dialect on phonemic awareness and nonword spelling tasks. These tasks were selected for their reliance on phonological and orthographic processing, which may be influenced by dialect use. Method: Eighty typically developing African American children in Grades 1 and 3 were first screened for dialect use and then…