English BESA Morphosyntax Performance Among Spanish–English Bilinguals Who Use African American English

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (10) ◽  
pp. 3826-3842
Author(s):  
Brandy Gatlin-Nash ◽  
Elizabeth D. Peña ◽  
Lisa M. Bedore ◽  
Gabriela Simon-Cereijido ◽  
Aquiles Iglesias
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
American English ◽  
Item Analysis ◽  
Area Under The Curve ◽  
Linguistically Diverse ◽  
African American English ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Composite Scores

Purpose This study examined the use of African American English (AAE) among a group of young Latinx bilingual children and the accuracy of the English Morphosyntax subtest of the Bilingual English–Spanish Assessment (BESA) in classifying these children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Method Children ( N = 81) between the ages of 4;0 and 7;1 (years;months) completed a narrative task and the BESA Morphosyntax subtest. We identified DLD based on four reference measures. We compared specific dialectal features used by children with DLD and their typically developing peers. We also conducted an overall analysis of the BESA subtest and subsequent item-level analyses to determine if particular items were more likely to contribute to the correct classification of the participants. Results Children with DLD used three AAE forms in their narrative samples (subject–verb agreement, zero copula/auxiliary, or zero past tense) more frequently than their typically developing peers. Area-under-the-curve estimates for the cloze, sentence repetition, and composite scores of the BESA indicated that the assessment identified children with DLD in the sample with good sensitivity. Item analysis indicated that the majority of items (84%) significantly differentiated typically developing children and children with DLD. Conclusions The BESA English Morphosyntax subtest appears to be a valid tool for the identification of DLD in children exposed to AAE and Spanish. We provide practical implications and suggestions for future research addressing the identification of DLD among children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Zero Marking of Past Tense in Child African American English

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 173-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Lee ◽  
Janna B. Oetting
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American English ◽  
African American English ◽  
Current Paper ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Grammatical Function

Zero marking of the simple past is often listed as a common feature of child African American English (AAE). In the current paper, we review the literature and present new data to help clinicians better understand zero marking of the simple past in child AAE. Specifically, we provide information to support the following statements: (a) By six years of age, the simple past is infrequently zero marked by typically developing AAE-speaking children; (b) There are important differences between the simple past and participle morphemes that affect AAE-speaking children's marking options; and (c) In addition to a verb's grammatical function, its phonetic properties help determine whether an AAE-speaking child will produce a zero marked form.

scholarly journals Forum: Serving African American English Speakers in Schools Through Interprofessional Education & Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Monique T. Mills
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Interprofessional Education ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
American English ◽  
Community Based Participatory Research ◽  
African American English ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Education Practice ◽  
Literacy Outcomes ◽  
American English Speakers

Purpose African American English (AAE) speakers often face mismatches between home language and school language, coupled with negative attitudes toward AAE in the classroom. This forum, Serving African American English Speakers in Schools Through Interprofessional Education & Practice, will help researchers, parents, and school-based practitioners communicate in ways that are synergistic, collaborative, and transparent to improve educational outcomes of AAE speakers. Method The forum includes a tutorial offering readers instructions on how to engage in community-based participatory research (Holt, 2021). Through two clinical focus articles, readers will recognize how AAE develops during the preschool years and is expressed across various linguistic contexts and elicitation tasks (Newkirk-Turner & Green, 2021) and identify markers of developmental language disorder within AAE from language samples analyzed in Computerized Language Analysis (Overton et al., 2021). Seven empirical articles employ such designs as quantitative (Byrd & Brown, 2021; Diehm & Hendricks, 2021; Hendricks & Jimenez, 2021; Maher et al., 2021; Mahurin-Smith et al., 2021), qualitative (Hamilton & DeThorne, 2021), and mixed methods (Mills et al., 2021). These articles will help readers identify ways in which AAE affects how teachers view its speakers' language skills and communicative practices and relates to its speakers' literacy outcomes. Conclusion The goal of the forum is to make a lasting contribution to the discipline with a concentrated focus on how to assess and address communicative variation in the U.S. classroom.

scholarly journals Marking of Tense and Agreement in Language Samples by Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment in African American English and Southern White English: Evaluation of Scoring Approaches and Cut Scores Across Structures

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 491-509
Author(s):  
Janna B. Oetting ◽  
Andrew M. Rivière ◽  
Jessica R. Berry ◽  
Kyomi D. Gregory ◽  
Tina M. Villa ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
American English ◽  
African American English ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Cut Scores ◽  
Specific Language

Purpose As follow-up to a previous study of probes, we evaluated the marking of tense and agreement (T/A) in language samples by children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing controls in African American English (AAE) and Southern White English (SWE) while also examining the clinical utility of different scoring approaches and cut scores across structures. Method The samples came from 70 AAE- and 36 SWE-speaking kindergartners, evenly divided between the SLI and typically developing groups. The structures were past tense, verbal – s, auxiliary BE present, and auxiliary BE past. The scoring approaches were unmodified, modified, and strategic; these approaches varied in the scoring of forms classified as nonmainstream and other. The cut scores were dialect-universal and dialect-specific. Results Although low numbers of some forms limited the analyses, the results generally supported those previously found for the probes. The children produced a large and diverse inventory of mainstream and nonmainstream T/A forms within the samples; strategic scoring led to the greatest differences between the clinical groups while reducing effects of the children's dialects; and dialect-specific cut scores resulted in better clinical classification accuracies, with measures of past tense leading to the highest levels of classification accuracy. Conclusions For children with SLI, the findings contribute to studies that call for a paradigm shift in how children's T/A deficits are assessed and treated across dialects. A comparison of findings from the samples and probes indicates that probes may be the better task for identifying T/A deficits in children with SLI in AAE and SWE. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.13564709

scholarly journals Dialect Awareness and Lexical Comprehension of Mainstream American English in African American English–Speaking Children

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (5) ◽  
pp. 1883-1895 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Edwards ◽  
Megan Gross ◽  
Jianshen Chen ◽  
Maryellen C. MacDonald ◽  
David Kaplan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American English ◽  
African American English ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Expressive Vocabulary ◽  
Vocabulary Size ◽  
Mixed Effect ◽  
Mixed Effect Models ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Mainstream American English

Purpose This study was designed to examine the relationships among minority dialect use, language ability, and young African American English (AAE)–speaking children's understanding and awareness of Mainstream American English (MAE). Method Eighty-three 4- to 8-year-old AAE-speaking children participated in 2 experimental tasks. One task evaluated their awareness of differences between MAE and AAE, whereas the other task evaluated their lexical comprehension of MAE in contexts that were ambiguous in AAE but unambiguous in MAE. Receptive and expressive vocabulary, receptive syntax, and dialect density were also assessed. Results The results of a series of mixed-effect models showed that children with larger expressive vocabularies performed better on both experimental tasks, relative to children with smaller expressive vocabularies. Dialect density was a significant predictor only of MAE lexical comprehension; children with higher levels of dialect density were less accurate on this task. Conclusions Both vocabulary size and dialect density independently influenced MAE lexical comprehension. The results suggest that children with high levels of nonmainstream dialect use have more difficulty understanding words in MAE, at least in challenging contexts, and suggest directions for future research.

Distinguishing African American English from developmental errors in the language production of toddlers

2005 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 597-620 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAMONDA HORTON–IKARD ◽  
SUSAN ELLIS WEISMER
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Language Production ◽  
American English ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
African American English ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
White Children ◽  
Standard American English ◽  
Language Sample Analysis ◽  
Language Sample

This study examined the use of nonstandard forms in the language production of typically developing toddlers. Forty-four African American and White children, ages 2.5 and 3.5 years, were assigned to one of four groups based on their chronological age and linguistic background. Language sample analysis and a listener judgment task were used to evaluate nonstandard speech. Results indicated that 2.5- and 3.5-year-old toddlers from African American English backgrounds produced similar amounts of nonstandard speech. However, 2.5-year-old toddlers from standard American English backgrounds produced greater amounts of nonstandard speech than their 3.5-year-old peers.

scholarly journals Phonological Features of Child African American English

2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 623-635 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly K. Craig ◽  
Connie A. Thompson ◽  
Julie A. Washington ◽  
Stephanie L. Potter
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American English ◽  
African American English ◽  
Read Aloud ◽  
African American Children ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Standard American English ◽  
Phonological Features ◽  
American Children ◽  
5Th Grade

The production of phonological features of African American English (AAE) was examined for 64 typically developing African American children in the 2nd through the 5th grade. Students read aloud passages written in Standard American English. Sixty of the students read the passages using AAE, and 8 different phonological features were represented in their readings. Phonological features were more frequent than morphosyntactic features. The findings as a whole support use of the taxonomy developed for this investigation in characterizing the phonological features of child AAE.

scholarly journals Grade-Related Changes in the Production of African American English

2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 450-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly K. Craig ◽  
Julie A. Washington
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Standardized Tests ◽  
American English ◽  
Central City ◽  
First Grade ◽  
African American English ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
African American Boys ◽  
Middle Income ◽  
Detroit Area

This investigation examined grade as a source of systematic variation in the African American English (AAE) produced by students in preschool through fifth grades. Participants were 400 typically developing African American boys and girls residing in low- or middle-income homes in an urban-fringe community or midsize central city in the metropolitan Detroit area. Between preschoolers and kindergartners, and between first through fifth graders, there were no significant differences in the amounts of dialect produced during a picture description language elicitation context. However, there was a significant downward shift in dialect production at first grade. Students who evidenced dialect shifting outper-formed their nonshifting peers on standardized tests of reading achievement and vocabulary breadth.

Sentence Repetition: A Clinical Marker for Developmental Language Disorder in Danish

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (12) ◽  
pp. 4450-4463
Author(s):  
Rikke Vang Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Language Disorder ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Likelihood Ratios ◽  
Clinical Marker ◽  
Sentence Repetition ◽  
Good Identification ◽  
Syntactic Properties

Purpose The aim of the study was to explore the potential of performance on a Danish sentence repetition (SR) task—including specific morphological and syntactic properties—to identify difficulties in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) relative to typically developing (TD) children. Furthermore, the potential of the task as a clinical marker for Danish DLD was explored. Method SR performance of children with DLD aged 5;10–14;1 (years;months; n = 27) and TD children aged 5;3–13;4 ( n = 87) was investigated. Results Compared to TD same-age peers, children with DLD were less likely to repeat the sentences accurately but more likely to make ungrammatical errors with respect to verb inflection and use of determiners and personal pronouns. Younger children with DLD also produced more word order errors that their TD peers. Furthermore, older children with DLD performed less accurately than younger TD peers, indicating that the SR task taps into morphosyntactic areas of particular difficulty for Danish children with DLD. The classification accuracy associated with SR performance showed high levels of sensitivity and specificity (> 90%) and likelihood ratios indicating good identification potential for clinical and future research purposes. Conclusion SR performance has a strong potential for identifying children with DLD, also in Danish, and with a carefully designed SR task, performance has potential for revealing morphosyntactic difficulties. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.10314437

Addressing African American English in Early Literacy Assessment and Instruction

2008 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Patton Terry
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Early Literacy ◽  
American English ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
African American English ◽  
Literacy Assessment ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
Speech Language Pathologist ◽  
Early Literacy Assessment

Abstract Determining how best to address young children's African American English use in formal literacy assessment and instruction is a challenge. Evidence is not yet available to discern which theory best accounts for the relation between AAE use and literacy skills or to delineate which dialect-informed educational practices are most effective for children in preschool and the primary grades. Nonetheless, consistent observations of an educationally significant relation between AAE use and various early literacy skills suggest that dialect variation should be considered in assessment and instruction practices involving children who are learning to read and write. The speech-language pathologist can play a critical role in instituting such practices in schools.

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