Measuring Language Competence in AA Children who are High Dialect Speakers

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PROJECT SUMMARY Research has identified the presence of African American English (AAE) as a complicating factor for assessment of the language skills of African American (AA) children. AAE is a major dialect of American English (AE), spoken by approximately 12% of the U.S. population. In clinical contexts, AAE overlaps with the linguistic characteristics documented for language impairments, making differentiation of language disorders and language differences difficult. In academic contexts, the mismatch hypothesis posits that the poor match between spoken language and text puts AAE-speaking children at risk for reading failure. Recent research has demonstrated that it is not the mere presence of AAE that leads to poor outcomes. Instead, it is the occurrence of high amounts of AAE that matters most. AAE use occurs on a continuum from low to high dialect use. Converging evidence from studies of dialect, language, reading and writing, have identified high dialect users as those AAE speakers who are at risk for failure or poor performances on a range of language-based instruments and tasks; low to moderate dialect users, on the other hand, do not evidence this same risk. Thus, it appears that it is the linguistic distance between the spoken standard and the language used by AAE dialect users that contributes to these high rates of difficulty. We propose that the impact of this distance on assessment in particular has resulted in underestimation of the linguistic competence of AA children, particularly those growing up in poverty, who are most likely to be dense users of AAE. It is therefore crucial to distinguish linguistic competence from linguistic performance when assessing high-density speakers of AAE. Accordingly, the Specific Aims of this project are: Aim 1: To explore measurement of language competence utilizing traditional psycholinguistic methods, (i.e., sentence repetition, grammatical judgment, and sentence building) within a sample of 450 African American children in 3rd through 5th grades who speak AAE. Aim 2: To develop a scoring rubric that supports both Mainstream American English (MAE) and AAE responding and that is useful for characterizing the language knowledge of children who are typically developing, dense AAE speakers. We will use confirmatory factor analysis for categorical items (i.e., item response theory) to test the experimental scales as well as to test the expected theoretical structure against the scores on other, established measures for convergent and discriminant validity.