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Evaluating The Effects Of Dialect On Kindergartners' Use Of Three Grammatical Structures In Narratives, Andromeda Patrice Love

LSU Master's Theses

The aim of this study was to determine if dialect status has an effect on the frequency at which kindergarteners produce nonmainstream English markings for regular third person, IS and ARE, and regular past tense when producing oral narratives. Specifically, I wished to determine if child speakers of African American English (AAE) and child speakers of Southern White English (SWE) mark these structures with nonmainstream English forms at different rates. The narrative data came from language samples that had been previously collected from twenty kindergarten speakers of AAE and twenty kindergarten speakers of SWE. All of the children were recruited …