Disorder within Dialects: An Expanded Test of Tense and Agreement in Sentence Recall for Children with DLD

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Project Summary Tense and agreement (T/A) deficits are routinely assessed and treated when children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) speak mainstream dialects of English and other languages, yet these grammar structures are typically excluded from clinical practice when children with DLD speak a nonmainstream dialect of English, such as African American English (AAE) or Southern White English (SWE). Excluding such structures is grounded in a fear of misinterpreting a child's nonmainstream dialect forms as a disorder, yet this practice leads to a disparity in the structures that can be assessed and treated across dialects. Fortunately, in a recent NIH-funded study conducted in the Deep South, we created a novel dialect-informed and strategically scored sentence recall task targeting T/A, and this task differentiated children with and without DLD within AAE and SWE with relatively high levels of accuracy1. These results call for a paradigm shift and the inclusion of T/A structures within clinical practice for all children. The next step toward bringing a dialect-informed and strategically scored sentence recall task targeting T/A to clinicians involves testing its ecological validity with children who present an expanded range of dialectal and psycholinguistic profiles. In addition, there is a need to systematically test the T/A structures within the task in different syntactic frames and evaluate the strategic scoring approach to further understand and maximize their contribution to diagnostic outcomes. Finally, theoretical questions exist as to why sentence recall might be a good discriminator of children with and without DLD across dialects, with one possibility being that this task interfaces with additional abilities that differentiate these groups beyond children's T/A systems, such as their vocabulary, working memory, and phonological short-term memory2,3. If so, we need to know if sentence recall interfaces with these abilities differentially depending on a child's clinical status and/or dialectal profile. Working within an innovative Disorder within Dialects framework, the proposed project seeks to further test the diagnostic accuracy and theoretical basis of a sentence recall task targeting T/A by: recruiting children who produce an expanded range of AAE and SWE (Aim 1); including children who present an expanded range of nonverbal IQ scores (Aim 2); testing each T/A form in a variety of syntactic frames and evaluating the scoring approach to optimize the task (Aim 3a and 3b); and testing between dialects and clinical groups, the relationship between the children's sentence recalls, their T/A systems, and their other psycholinguistic abilities (Aim 4). To achieve these aims, we will collect data from children with and without DLD in kindergarten and 1st grade in six different dialect communities (AAE: rural, suburban, urban; SWE: rural, suburban, urban). The proposed work will be the first of its kind to detail the dialectal and psycholinguistic variation that exists between and within AAE- and SWE-speaking children who live in the Deep South and evaluate with rigor a sentence recall task targeting T/A for these children.