NEGATIVE CONCORD IN AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH

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The primary objective of this project is to document the locality conditions/principles that permit negative concord in African American English (AAE). It is hypothesized that child AAE speakers will use negative concord (noc) in contexts where Standard American English (SAE) speakers use ANY. However, it is also hypothesized that child AAE speakers have knowledge of when to interpret double negative contexts as true negation (NOt). Current linguistic theory is applied in the devising of experimental tasks that are narrowly defined, yet powerful enough to display children's linguistic knowledge about negation. Children aged 4-7 years will be administered comprehension and production tasks involving negative concord (noc) and true negative (NOt) constructions to determine how they mentally process and construct aspects of negation with respect to their native dialect. The data complied from the experimental tasks may provide insight into the nature of mental functioning and language use. The implication for diagnosing language impairment separate from cognitive, emotional, and/or hearing impairment is significant for standard and nonstandard dialect speakers given that the tasks may tease appart linguistic knowledge from cognition.