BE, DO, and Modal Auxiliaries of 3-Year-Old African American English Speakers

Abstract

Results extend previous studies by showing dialect-specific effects for children's use of auxiliaries and by showing these effects to vary by auxiliary type and children's nonmainstream dialect densities. Some aspects of the children's auxiliary systems (i.e., pattern of marking across auxiliaries and effects of syntactic construction) were also consistent with what has been documented for children who speak other dialects of English. These findings show dialect-specific and dialect-universal aspects of African American English to be present early in children's acquisition of auxiliaries.

Specific Language Impairment in African American English and Southern White English: Measures of Tense and Agreement With Dialect-Informed Probes and Strategic Scoring

“…Finally, the children's is and was responses were included in calculations of are and were if the grammatical subject was plural (e.g., The bears is/was…), and are and were forms were included in calculations of is and was if the grammatical subject was singular (e.g., The bear are/were…). This coding decision is consistent with standard test administration practices but differs from what has been done in other AAE and SWE studies, which have coded children's BE forms based on surface structure (e.g., coding a response as was regardless of the subject; Berry & Oetting, 2017; Newkirk-Turner, Oetting, & Stockman, 2014Oetting & Garrity, 2006;Roy, Oetting, & Moland, 2013).…”

“…This scoring approach considered all Mainstream and Nonmainstream Overt forms as marked and all Zero forms as unmarked. Although Zero forms are allowable in AAE and SWE, they were scored as unmarked because we expected the SLI groups to produce higher percentages of these forms than the TD controls (for a similar scoring approach, see Berry & Oetting, 2017;Garrity & Oetting, 2010;Newkirk-Turner et al, 2014;Pruitt & Oetting, 2009;Roy et al, 2013). In addition, all responses classified as Other were excluded from the strategic scoring approach.…”

Dialect Variation of Copula and Auxiliary Verb BE: African American English–Speaking Children With and Without Gullah/Geechee Heritage

“…Findings from many other studies are consistent with Weldon's AAE results and show that for both adults and children, copula and auxiliary forms of BE in AAE are typically overtly marked at high rates (> 90%) for am, was, and were, with variable rates of marking for is and are (e.g., Blake, 1997;Garrity & Oetting, 2010;Green, 2002;Newkirk, Oetting, & Stockman, 2014;Rickford, 1998;Rickford, Ball, Blake, Jackson, & Martin, 1991;Roy, Oetting, & Moland, 2013). In AAE, rates of overt marking also are lowest for are, and speakers can level BE, which leads to the use of is and was within are and were contexts.…”

“…Studies of children speaking AAE typically combine productions of was and were (e.g., Newkirk et al, 2014;Roy et al, 2013). Both of these forms, and especially were, are infrequent in conversational samples, and combining them together increases the number of children who can contribute data to an analysis.…”

“…The nonmainstream forms that occur in both Gullah and AAE include the three previously identified forms (i.e., zero marked is, zero marked are, BE leveling involving is for are and was for were) and I'ma, which is a contraction of the phrase "I am going to." Although we found no evidence of I'ma in a sample of Turner's early Gullah transcripts that we reviewed (Turner, 1949), we added this form to the others because this contraction has been well attested in child AAE speakers (e.g., Oetting & McDonald, 2001;Newkirk et al, 2014) and is regularly produced by modern-day speakers of GG. Although the number of children who produced these shared nonmainstream forms did not differ between the groups (+GG n = 18; −GG n = 19), their average frequencies within samples did, F(1, 36) = 14.26, p = .001, ɳ 2 = .28.…”