2018 Alternates 6716

2018 Alternates | Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Poster Session II, Metcalf Small | 3:15pm

Acquisition of a late-developing syntactic structure by African-American-English- speaking learners of the mainstream dialect
B. Zurer Pearson, J. Jackson

Relatively little is known about the stages of acquisition of syntactic structures specific to African-American-English (AAE). Influential hypotheses (Charity etal., 2004; Terry etal., 2010) propose that the mismatch between home and school language varieties creates a cognitive burden for AAE-speakers learning mainstream-English (MAE). Therefore, much clinical and educational literature is devoted to encouraging and measuring the decrease in AAE-speakers’ use of AAE (Renn & Terry, 2009, a.o.). A smaller developmental literature focuses on structures that are specific to AAE (See Green, 2011). Analyses for the current paper explores the emergence of AAE-syntax that fulfills a pragmatic function: reporting a question.  Since reported, or so-called Indirect Questions are not salient and are rarely “corrected” by MAE- speakers, one can observe their development in AAE-speakers without social pressures to eliminate their use. First, we establish which children in our sample may be considered AAE- speakers. Then we present the analogous AAE and MAE forms used by African-American (AA) and European-American (EurA) children with differing diagnostic and language-variation status at different ages.

During field-testing for the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation tests (Seymour etal., 2003, 2005), a standardized elicitation for 11 salient morphosyntactic features of AAE— such as invariant present-tense verb-agreement (he run), or double-negative–was used with a nationwide sample of 722 AA and 278 EurA children, ages 4-12yrs. Based on response rates observed for EurA-participants, baselines for use by non-AAE-speakers were established. A mean of 10% contrastive-morphosyntax items at 4yrs, 3% at 7-to-8yrs and <1% after 10yrs were considered to show “no difference from MAE.” Among the AA 4yr-olds in our sample, 10% showed “no difference from MAE” in the elicitation, including 2% who used no AAE features at all. 85% of AA 5-6yr-olds demonstrated “some-“ or “strong-difference from MAE,” including 26% who gave 100% AAE responses. By age 8yrs, only 2% gave >90% AAE-only responses (Jackson & Pearson, 2010). Most others used a mix of AAE and MAE, averaging about 30% AAE-only responses.

This transition around age 8 toward greater convergence in contrastive-morphosyntax coincided with greater divergence in the syntax for question reports. Participants saw scenes where one character is asking a question of another character, and were asked, “What is the boy asking his dad?” (or girl asking her mom, etc.) Figure 1 shows that both Direct questions (Can I go outside?) and Indirect questions ([asking] if he can go outside, or [asking] can he go outside) were used at all ages. Direct questions hovered around 35 to 45% of responses throughout the age-range, but the proportion opting for Indirect questions increased from about 20% at 4yrs to over 50% at 10-12yrs. Among EurA-participants, the if-complementizer without inversion predominated, whereas among AA-children, third-person subjects with auxiliary-inversion predominated (Green, 2002). A few AA-children with various AAE-density levels used if; but there was a clear divide by language variety between the alternative formulations. There was no statistical difference in DELV-NR standardized scores for perspective-shifters, regardless of the form used. These findings attest to the pragmatic appropriateness of the AAE-forms in a school- environment.

References

Charity, A., Scarborough, H., & Griffin, D. (2004). Familiarity with school English in African American children and its relation to early reading achievement. Child Development, 75(5), 1340-1356.

Green, L. J. (2002). African American English: A linguistic introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Green, L. J. (2011). Language and the African American Child. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jackson, J. E. & Pearson, B. Z. (2010). Variable use of features associated with African American English by typically-developing children, ages 4 to 12. Topics in Language Disorders, 30 (2), 135-144.

Renn, J. & Terry, J. M. (2009). Operationalizing style: Quantifying the use of style shift in the speech of African American adolescents. American Speech, 84, 367-390.

Seymour, H. N., Roeper, T., & de Villiers, J. G. (2003). Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation, Screening Test (DELV-ST). San Antonio TX: The Psychological Corporation. (now Ventris Learning, publisher).

Seymour, H. N., Roeper, T., & de Villiers, J. G. (2005). Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation, Norm Referenced (DELV-NR). San Antonio TX: The Psychological Corp. (now Ventris Learning, publisher).

Terry, J. M., Hendrick, R., Evangelou, E. & Smith, R. L. (2010). Variable dialect-switching among African American children: Inferences about working memory. Lingua, 120 (10), 2463-2475.