For children whose everyday speech differs greatly from the School English (SE) they encounter in academic materials and settings, it was hypothesized that greater familiarity with SE would be associated with more successful early reading acquisition. Sentence imitation and reading skills of 217 urban African American students in kindergarten through second grade (ages 5 to 8 years) were assessed. Children in each grade varied widely in the extent to which their imitations of SE sentences included phonological and grammatical forms that are acceptable in African American Vernacular English but not in SE. Higher familiarity with SE (reproducing SE features more often when imitating) was associated with better reading achievement, and these relationships were independent of memory ability.

Le parcours individuel de locuteurs dans des changements linguistiques en cours à l’échelle de la communauté linguistique francophone de Montréal constitue le thème de cet article. Un examen du comportement linguistique d’une cohorte de francophones montréalais interviewés à trois reprises au cours de leur vie, en 1971, 1984 et 1995, lève certaines zones d’ombre sur la participation individuelle aux changements sociolinguistiques et sur la question de l’âge critique de l’acquisition. Les résultats livrés concernent deux changements en cours – la norme de prononciation du /r/ et l’usage des pronoms toniques au pluriel – et l’interprétation proposée tient compte des caractéristiques linguistiques et de la signification sociale des deux variables.The central theme of this article is how language change at the community level among Montreal Francophones is realized in the trajectories of individual speakers. An examination of the language behavior of a cohort of Montrealers interviewed at three different stages of their lives (in 1971, 1984 and 1995) casts in a new light the questions of individual participation in sociolinguistic change, and of a critical period for acquisition. We analyze two changes in progress, the norm for the pronunciation of /r/, and the use of tonic plural personal pronouns, and propose an interpretation that takes into account the different linguistic characters and social significance of the two variables

Comprehensive investigations of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) have demonstrated that most features of AAVE reported in the sociolinguistic literature are consistently seen in nearly every African-American speech community in which vernacular speech has been documented. This article highlights quantitative regional differences in the speech produced by African-American children from three U.S. cities in an academic setting. In this analysis, 157 5- to 8-year-old African-American children in New Orleans, LA, Washington, DC, and Cleveland, OH imitated the sentences of a story presented in Standard American English (SAE) by teachers. The 15 sentences included many items that were possible mismatches between the child's vernacular and SAE. Afterwards, the children retold the story in their own words. Children's use of SAE and AAVE features in both tasks was analyzed. Higher rates of AAVE feature use occurred in New Orleans than in Cleveland or Washington, DC.

In this article, I examine and promote the role of linguist as agent for social change.