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African American English-Speaking Children's Judgments Of Grammaticality: Effects Of Clinical Status And Grammatical Structures, Lori Elizabeth Vaughn

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

African American English (AAE)-speaking children’s ability to judge the grammaticality of sentences was evaluated by their clinical status and grammatical structure. The study originated from a need to understand more about the tense and agreement systems of AAE speakers with specific language impairment (SLI) relative to their typically developing (TD) AAE-speaking peers. Tense and agreement forms are typically excluded from the assessment and treatment of children who speak AAE in fear of misinterpreting a dialect difference as a language disorder. As a result, limited information exists about the tense and agreement systems of AAE-speaking children.

The data were archival and …

An Analysis Of Spelling Patterns Produced By Elementary School-Aged Speakers Of African American English, Lindsay Meyer Turner

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Over the years, less attention is given to students’ spelling skills compared to other areas of literacy achievement like word reading and passage comprehension in relationship to nonmainstream dialect usage. Considering that English spelling is based on the phonological and morphological structures of Mainstream American English (MAE), it is likely that children who speak a nonmainstream dialect such as African American English (AAE) will demonstrate differences in their spelling abilities. The purposes of this study were to explore the relationship between degree of AAE dialect use and spelling for a group of first to third grade children, and to describe …

Use Of Copula And Auxiliary Be By African American Children With Gullah/Geechee Heritage, Jessica Richardson Berry

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to document the auxiliary and copula BE system of African American (AA) children with Gullah/Geechee (GG) heritage and to compare the findings to those from African American English (AAE)-speaking children without this heritage and to what has been documented in previous studies of Gullah and AAE. The data came from 38 children, aged five to six years. Nineteen were from rural South Carolina and classified as GG, and 19 were from rural Louisiana and classified as AAE. All were developing language typically, and the groups were matched on a number of socio-demographic variables and …

The Auxiliary System Of Typically Developing Children Acquiring African American English, Brandi Lynette Newkirk

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study’s purpose was to examine the acquisition and use of BE, DO, and modal auxiliaries by African American English (AAE)-speaking children. The impetus for this work was the lack of information regarding the developmental trajectory of these auxiliary types and their use, in AAE relative to what is known about auxiliary acquisition and use in Mainstream American English (MAE). The study used two datasets of language samples: one that contained 48 language samples from 3 ½-year-old children and one that contained 36 longitudinal language samples of five children who were between 18 and 51 months of age. Results from …

Children's Production Of Verbal -S By Dialect Type And Clinical Status, Lesli H. Cleveland

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The study examined children’s use of verbal –s marking (e.g., he walks) in two nonmainstream dialects of English, African American English (AAE), and Southern White English (SWE). Verbal –s marking was of interest because there are gaps in the literature about the nature of this structure within and across typically developing children who speak AAE and SWE and about the nature of this structure in AAE- and SWE-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI). To address these gaps, children’s verbal –s marking was examined as a function of their dialect and clinical status and as a function of a number …

Grammatical Morphology Of Children Reared In Poverty: Implications For Specific Language Impairment, Sonja L. Pruitt

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In the current study, the past tense systems of children reared in poverty were examined. Guiding the study was Rice and Wexler’s (1996) Extended Optional Infinitive (EOI) account, which makes a number of predictions about the past tense systems of children with specific language impairment (SLI). The goal of the current study was to determine if these predictions apply to other children with weak language systems, such as those reared in poverty. The participants included 15 six-year-olds from low-income backgrounds (LSES), 15 age-matched peers from middle-income backgrounds (AM), and 15 language-matched peers from middle-income backgrounds (LM). All were African American …