Distinguishing Dialect and Development from Disorder: Case Studies

Abstract

Seven case studies are presented to illustrate how the tasks in the proposed test battery provide the tools to distinguish language differences due to development or dialect from true signs of delay or disorder. The case studies exemplify different combinations of language strengths and weakness found among participants of extensive field research in the age range from 4 to 9 years. Special attention is paid to certain aspects of language development, such as time clauses or double wh-questions, in which dialect features play no role. All levels of performance, from the highest to the lowest, are found in children who are speakers of Mainstream American English (MAE) and the same is true for those whose language patterns indicate a strong variation from MAE.KEYWORDS: Profile, path of progress, subdomain, item types, strength, weakness, interpretationLearning Outcomes: As a result of this activity, the participant will be able to identify (1) how breaking down the items on the proposed diagnostic test into subtypes helps to profile the child's strengths and weaknesses, and (2) why it is vital to consider all three factors-development, dialect, and disorder-when evaluating a child's language.First and foremost, the goal for a dialectsensitive language assessment is to help clinicians identify the signs of language disorder in children without penalizing them for dialect features or typical linguistic development. Some children will exhibit signs of all three factors (i.e., disorder, dialect, and development); others will exhibit just one or two signs in different combinations. The ideal assessment helps clinicians recognize when dialect features are present alone or in conjunction with signs of delayed or disordered development, and also when delay or disorder is apparent, but dialect features are not. As with all assessment Evaluating Language Variation: Distinguishing Dialect and

Dialect-Neutral Indices of Narrative Cohesion and Evaluation

“…The tasks can also be presented in a battery with other noncontrastive assessments to achieve a fuller picture of a child's level of language functioning. Indeed, one of the stories from this study was incorporated into the DELV-NR (Seymour et al, 2005), and informal age-graded benchmarks are available for these features (P. de Villiers, 2004;Pearson & Ciolli, 2004).…”

“…Unlike the expression of true beliefs, false beliefs are an unambiguous test of children's ability to separate their own beliefs from those of the characters (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995; J. de Villiers, Roeper, BlandStewart, & Pearson, 2008). The development of understanding false beliefs has been studied in the context of predicting a character's response to a complex wh-question (J. de Villiers et al, 2008;Pearson & Ciolli, 2004). For example, one type of complex sentence embeds a false clause inside a true one, as in, She said she bought bananas (when in fact she bought a new bicycle).…”

“…By contrast, because false beliefs of the story characters are almost always distinct from the child's own thoughts and reactions (as in the example with bananas and a bicycle), they are thus more informative about a narrator's developmental stage than are true beliefs. Pearson and Ciolli (2004, TBL1 Table 1) reported a loose progression in typical development. At age 4, almost half of the children in their study responded that a character who heard the complex sentence would answer with their own Note.…”

Evaluating the Grammars of Children Who Speak Nonmainstream Dialects of English

“…Others may cite work by Stockman (1996, 2000), Wyatt (2012), and others to explain test biases, both historical and present, that limit one’s ability to evaluate and ultimately serve nonmainstream English-speaking children. Still others may cite work by Seymour et al to describe nonmainstream English-speaking children’s use of contrastive and noncontrastive grammar structures and to argue for the former to be excluded from assessment (Pearson & Ciolli, 2004; Seymour, 2004; Seymour, Bland-Stewart, & Green, 1998). …”