Examining the Use of Spoken Dialect Indices With African American Children in the Southern United States

Abstract

Newer measures of NMAE, such as the DELV-ST and DVAR scores, are comparable to older measures such as dialect density measures and listener judgment ratings. Like listener judgment ratings, the DELV-ST and DVAR scores offer clinicians and researchers alike a quicker alternative to dialect density measures for confirming and quantifying the spoken production of NMAE dialect. The present findings confirm that, depending on the type of data collected and questions posed, researchers and clinicians alike are able to choose from multiple, valid, and reliable measures of non-mainstream dialect use.

Working memory performance in children with and without specific language impairment in two nonmainstream dialects of English

“…For speakers of AAE, there were 6 classified as low (SLI: 0; TD: 6), 12 classified as medium (SLI: 6; TD: 6), and 52 classified as high (SLI: 29; TD: 23). As mentioned earlier, while there are many ways to measure a child's nonmainstream dialect density, such as DELV-S scores, listener judgments, or calculating the number of types or tokens of nonmainstream structures produced, they all are correlated to each other (Horton & Apel, 2014; Oetting & McDonald, 2002). While the test developers of the DELV-S categorize children into three dialect density groups based on their responses, we and others have also used the DELV-S items to calculate the more continuous measure of each child's percentage of nonmainstream responses over the sum of the child's nonmainstream and mainstream responses (Oetting et al, 2016; Terry et al, 2010).…”

“…Besides being a speaker of a nonmainstream dialect, another factor that appears to have important implications for investigating SLI in diverse groups of language learners is a child's nonmainstream dialect density. There are multiple ways to measure a child's nonmainstream dialect density, but all are correlated to each other and involve calculating the relative frequency (i.e., rate) with which a child produces nonmainstream forms (Horton & Apel, 2014; Oetting & McDonald, 2002). Both internal variables such as gender, age, and socioeconomic status and external variables such as type of task, modality of task, and speaking partner contribute to this variation (for some examples of child studies, see Barbu, Martin, & Chevrot, 2014; Craig, Kolenic, & Hensel, 2014; Craig & Washington, 2004; Craig, Zhang, Hensel, & Quinn, 2009; Ivy & Masterson, 2011; Mills, 2015; Van Hofwegen & Wolfram, 2010; Washington & Craig, 1998).…”

Sentence Recall by Children With SLI Across Two Nonmainstream Dialects of English

“…The DELV-ST and listener judgments to classify and describe a child's dialect have been used in multiple studies (e.g., DELV-ST: Champion, Rosa-Lugo, Rivers, & McCabe, 2010;N. P. Terry, Connor, Petscher, & Conlin, 2012;listener judgments: Cotrell, Williams, Talley, & Taran, 2012;Horton-Ikard & Weismer, 2005;Pruitt & Oetting, 2009) and led to complementary information about a child's dialect (Horton & Apel, 2014).…”

The Impact of Dialect Density on the Growth of Language and Reading in African American Children

“…Studies of oral language and AAE dialect in young children and youth have had three broad goals in educational and clinical contexts: (a) to document the developmental nature of AAE, including the use of specific morphological, syntactic, and phonological dialect forms and their impact in various discourse contexts (Craig & Washington, 2002;Horton & Apel, 2014;Mills, 2015;Mills, Watkins, Washington, Nippold, & Schneider, 2013;Moyle, Heilmann, & Finneran, 2014;Thompson et al, 2004); (b) to examine the impact of AAE on educational skills, in particular, reading, spelling, and writing (Ivy & Masterson, 2011;Kohler et al, 2007;Thompson et al, 2004); and (c) to differentiate language difference from language disorder in clinical speech and language contexts Newkirk-Turner et al, 2014;Oetting et al, 2010). These studies have been influential in shaping our current thinking about dialect and its impact, in that they have confirmed its developmental nature and documented differences in the use of dialect across ages in cross-sectional samples of dialect users.…”

“…What all three measurement methods share is that they are focused on the number of dialect features present in a child's oral language sample at either the word or utterance level and the percentage, or proportion, of dialect used in the overall language sample. These methods are highly correlated with each other (Horton & Apel, 2014;Oetting & McDonald, 2002). Dialect density has become a standard metric used in investigations focused on AAE in children.…”