ERIC Number: EJ772352
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2007
Pages: 45
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1048-9223
EISSN: N/A
The Acquisition Path for Tense-Aspect: Remote Past and Habitual in Child African American English
Green, Lisa; Roeper, Thomas
Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, v14 n3 p269-313 2007
This article considers the comprehension of tense-aspect markers remote past BIN and habitual be by 3- to 5-year-old developing African American English (AAE)-speaking children and their Southwest Louisiana Vernacular English (SwLVE)-speaking peers. Overall both groups of children associated BIN with the distant past; however, the AAE-speaking children were twice as likely to give a distant past response on the BIN went task. These results are discussed in terms of event realization, the Aspect Hypothesis, and feature agreement. We delineate a path that uses the lexical part of the Aspect Hypothesis, the role of semantics in defining the end state of a refined aspectual system, and an interface between syntax and semantics to explain subtle steps involving agreement in the acquisition process. The AAE-speaking children scored significantly higher on the habitual be tasks than the SwLVE-speaking children, whose scores were not significantly different from chance. The results suggest that the AAE-speaking children have developing native knowledge of habitual be and are beginning to associate it with eventualities that recur.
Descriptors: North American English, Syntax, Semantics, Indigenous Knowledge, Black Dialects, Morphemes, African Americans, Grammar, Task Analysis, Linguistic Theory, Scores, Language Acquisition, Contrastive Linguistics, Young Children
Lawrence Erlbaum. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 325 Chestnut Street Suite 800, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Fax: 215-625-2940; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/default.html
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Louisiana
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A