First and second graders’ interpretation of Standard American English morphology across varieties of English

Abstract

While African American English (AAE) and Standard American English (SAE) share many features, there are also differences that could affect comprehension. This article examines how 1st and 2nd grade AAE- and SAE-speaking children interpret sentences containing shared lexical and morphological (i.e., plural –s) forms as compared to sentences containing forms that do not regularly occur in AAE (past tense –ed, 3rd person present –s, future contracted –’ll). Using a picture-choice task the study found that while all children correctly interpreted shared forms, only the SAE-speakers, but not the AAE-speakers, successfully interpreted SAE tense morphology. In addition, the AAE-speakers showed no grade-related changes in performance. This suggests that linguistic differences may impact educational access for AAE-speaking students. These, and other implications, are discussed.

Specific Language Impairment in African American English and Southern White English: Measures of Tense and Agreement With Dialect-Informed Probes and Strategic Scoring

“…Modified scoring approaches accommodate children's dialect differences by scoring nonmainstream responses as correct. The practice is endorsed by the American Speech- Language-Hearing Association (2003) because it helps close the gap between scores earned by mainstream and nonmainstream English speakers (Beyer & Hudson-Kam, 2011;Charity, Scarborough, & Griffin, 2004;Terry, Jackson, Evangelou, & Smith, 2010). However, scoring all nonmainstream responses as correct reduces the number of items and potentially entire categories of content (e.g., tense and agreement) that can be used to identify children with SLI.…”

Sentence Recall by Children With SLI Across Two Nonmainstream Dialects of English

“…Sentence recall has also been shown to be influenced by a child's dialect. Beyer and Hudson Kam (2011) found that 45 first-and second-grade children who spoke African American English (AAE) made significantly more alterations to 10 sentences in a recall task than did children who spoke General American English. In fact, when all alterations were counted as errors, no AAE child speaker earned a sentence recall score that was within 2 SD of those who spoke General American English.…”

The impact of dialect differences on spoken language comprehension

“…Edwards et al (2014) found that dialect density was predictive of how AAE speakers comprehended words and phrases that contained contrastive dialect features. Other studies (De Villiers & Johnson, 2007; Beyer & Hudson Kam, 2012) did not directly examine the relationship between dialect density and comprehension; however, they did not observe age- or grade-related changes in comprehension of MAE. Since, previous research has shown that as age and grade increase, AAE-speaking students’ dialect density decreases (Brown, et al, 2015; Gatlin & Wanzek, 2015), this suggests that a decrease in the production of AAE features may not equate to increased use of MAE verb morphology as a comprehension cue.…”

“…By contrast, AAE-speaking children did not reliably produce third-person singular -s in production or use it as a comprehension cue at the age of 6 or 7 years (De Villiers & Johnson, 2007; Newkirk-Turner & Green, 2016, 2021). Beyer and Hudson Kam (2012) used a picture-choice task to examine how AAE- and MAE-speaking children in 1st and 2nd grade used a wider variety of morphological forms that are contrastive between AAE and MAE (e.g., past tense -ed, third-person singular -s, future contracted -ll; she’ll or he’ll ). In the task, participants listened to sentences that were produced in MAE and were instructed to select the picture that best matched what they heard.…”