Language Variation and Theory of Mind in Typical Development: An Exploratory Study of School-Age African American Narrators

Abstract

ToM indicators, such as false-belief mentioning, provide information about African American children's narrative ability and appear to be dialect-neutral.

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

“…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).…”

“…Hence, raters listened to two narratives elicited under differing visual conditions (no visual = personal narrative, visual = five-picture sequence narrative). We chose to include narratives elicited from no visual and from a five-picture sequence for efficiency of listening because the two conditions yielded narratives of relatively short length compared to a wordless book (Mills, 2015b;Mills & Fox, 2016), reducing the listening time required of each adult rater.…”

“…Child narrators had participated in a larger study examining the correlates of narrative language in school-age Black children (Mahurin-Smith et al, 2021, this issue;Mills, 2015b;Mills & Fox, 2016). Accordingly, children were 2 Approval for this study was obtained from the institutional review board of the University of Houston after the first author moved to that institution.…”

“…In addition to employing narrative styles that are undervalued in the classroom, school-age Black children may produce narratives in African American English (AAE)a dialect of American English that, in many classrooms, is not recognized as a legitimate variety of English despite having a systematic and rule-governed grammar, vocabulary, and sound system (Burns et al, 2012;Mills, 2015a;Mills et al, 2013;Mills & Fox, 2016). Although AAE shares linguistic features with mainstream American English (MAE), it also has linguistic features not present in MAE (e.g., cold pronounced as coal, zero possessive, habitual BE).…”

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

“…Across cultures, narratives are listened to and spoken by children and by people in children's speech communities (Berman & Slobin, 1994;Curenton, 2010;McCabe, 1997;Melzi, 2000). Furthermore, recent studies have identified dialectneutral indices of narrative language, such as internal-state vocabulary, on which child speakers of MAE and NMAE varieties do not differ (Burns, de Villiers, Pearson, & Champion, 2012;Mills & Fox, 2016). Furthermore, recent studies have identified dialectneutral indices of narrative language, such as internal-state vocabulary, on which child speakers of MAE and NMAE varieties do not differ (Burns, de Villiers, Pearson, & Champion, 2012;Mills & Fox, 2016).…”