Dialect density, language abilities and emergent literacy skills of prekindergarten children who speak African American English

Abstract

Background: Numerous studies have observed a significant and unique relationship between children's use of nonmainstream dialect and reading outcomes. We aimed to examine the relationship between nonmainstream dialect and reading at its roots by completing a preliminary evaluation of the relationship between African American English (AAE) dialect and multiple dimensions of emergent literacy skills in young African American children enrolled in Head Start. Methods: Seventy-eight African American preschoolers completed the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening-PreK (PALS-PreK) and a narrative retell of the wordless picture book, Frog, Where Are You? The narratives were used to generate three measures of narrative productivity and the dialect density measure (DDM). Results: Structural equation modelling found that the PALS-PreK measures significantly loaded onto a single print-related emergent literacy latent variable and that the three narrative measures significantly loaded onto a single language-based emergent literacy latent variable. There was a significant relationship between print-related emergent literacy skills and DDM, but the overall model had a poor fit, showing that the relationship between emergent literacy and DDM was weak. Conclusions: We conclude the manuscript by discussing implications of this research and suggestions for further study.

Becoming fictional storytellers: African American children's oral narrative development in early elementary school

“…One possible explanation is that greater AAE use allows children to be more concise in their C‐units (i.e., shorter MLCU) when telling stories, while not sacrificing their macrostructure, productivity or complex syntax use. Other work, however, has found a positive association between African American children's dialect density and MLCU (e.g., Caesar & Kerins, 2020) or no association at all (e.g., Baldwin et al., 2022). These mixed results leave unanswered questions about why and under what conditions (e.g., narrative elicitation task) MLCU may or may not be associated with dialect use.…”