Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Development of Dialectal Variation in African American English

非裔美国英语（AAE）在句法、语义和音系上与主流美国英语（MAE）不同，但这些系统在非裔美国英语中的发展却很少受到文献的关注。例如，说AAE和MAE的幼儿在使用MAE形式(1)“几点了？”和(2)“我不想要饮料”的同时，还会使用(1)“几点了？”和(2)“我不想要饮料”这样的疑问句形式。然而，说MAE的孩子在获得MAE的成人能力后会停止使用(1)和(2)的形式，而说ae的孩子在说MAE的孩子停止使用后会继续使用它们。此外，由于成人AAE同时使用(1)和（1‘）以及(2)和（2’），在某种程度上，说AAE的儿童继续使用(1)和(2)并不是习得错误，而是成年人对他们方言的熟练程度。也就是说，说AAE的儿童必须能够获得(1)和（1‘）以及(2)和（2’）之间的变化，作为他们语言技能的一部分。本博士论文研究改进奖支持在路易斯安那州新奥尔良使用的AAE和MAE方言中问题和否定发展的比较研究。通过对5岁、6岁和7岁儿童的自发言语和实验任务收集的数据，本项目将揭示AAE的适当发展阶段，并有助于区分儿童AAE的发育变化与成人问题形成和否定的成功习得的变化。更一般地说，这项研究将有助于理解不同英语变体在语言发展的不同阶段的局限性。

African American English (AAE) differs from mainstream American English (MAE) syntactically, semantically, and phonologically, but the development of these systems in AAE has received little attention in the literature. For example, both AAE- and MAE-speaking young children use question forms like (1) "What time it is?" and negative statement forms like (2) "I don't want no drink" alongside the MAE forms (1') "What time is it?" and (2') "I don't want a drink". However, whereas MAE-speaking children discontinue use of forms like (1) and (2) as they gain adult competence in MAE, AAE-speaking children continue using them after the MAE-speaking children have stopped doing so. Moreover, since adult AAE employs both (1) and (1') and (2) and (2'), at some point the continued use of the (1) and (2) by AAE-speaking children is not an acquisition error, but adult proficiency in their dialect. That is, child AAE speakers must be able to acquire variation between (1) and (1') and (2) and (2') as part of their linguistic repertoire.This Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award supports comparative research on the development of questions and negations in the dialects of AAE and MAE spoken in New Orleans, Louisiana. Using spontaneous speech and data gathered through experimental task from 5, 6, and 7 year-old participants, this project will shed new light on appropriate developmental stages for AAE, and it will help distinguish variation in child AAE that is developmental from variation that signals successful acquisition of adult question formation and negation. More generally, this research will contribute to understanding the limits of variation across varieties of English at different stages of language development.