Does Rare Vocabulary Use Distinguish Giftedness From Typical Development? A Study of School-Age African American Narrators

Abstract

Examining school-age African American children's facility with rare vocabulary production appears to be a dialect-neutral way to measure their narrative language and to distinguish gifted children from typically developing children.

Narrative Language Sampling in Typical Development: Implications for Clinical Trials

“…In fact, expressive language sampling procedures have been shown to be effective at identifying children with language impairments, even in the absence of low IQs (e.g., as in specific language impairment ;Heilmann, Miller, & Nockerts, 2010;Rescorla, Roberts, & Dahlsgaard, 1997;Rice, Redmond, & Hoffman, 2006;Rice et al, 2010). Furthermore, if anything, these procedures are less subject to identification bias in ethnic and racial minority groups than traditional standardized norm-referenced language assessments (Craig & Washington, 2000;Heilmann & Westerveld, 2013;Mills, Mahurin-Smith, & Steele, 2017).…”

Perceptions of Black Children's Narrative Language: A Mixed-Methods Study

“…Yet, studies of school-age children indicate that personal narration allows for more improvisation and opportunities to express comedic verve and rare vocabulary than does fictional narration (cf. Mills et al, 2017). Parents also valued these more performative narrative qualities, listening for how funny children sounded significantly more than did teachers.…”

“…Although racial differences in narration have been studied since the 1960s, efforts to identify culturally-fair measures of narrative language for AAE speakers are relatively recent. Candidate measures include false-belief mentioning (Mills & Fox, 2016) and rare vocabulary usage (Mills et al, 2017), as they were positively correlated with measures of language productivity and educational placement but not correlated with language variation. Language variation-the extent to which children's language differed from MAE-was measured by the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation-Screening Test (DELV-S; Seymour et al, 2003).…”