Regional differences in low SES African-American children's speech in the school setting

Abstract

Comprehensive investigations of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) have demonstrated that most features of AAVE reported in the sociolinguistic literature are consistently seen in nearly every African-American speech community in which vernacular speech has been documented. This article highlights quantitative regional differences in the speech produced by African-American children from three U.S. cities in an academic setting. In this analysis, 157 5- to 8-year-old African-American children in New Orleans, LA, Washington, DC, and Cleveland, OH imitated the sentences of a story presented in Standard American English (SAE) by teachers. The 15 sentences included many items that were possible mismatches between the child's vernacular and SAE. Afterwards, the children retold the story in their own words. Children's use of SAE and AAVE features in both tasks was analyzed. Higher rates of AAVE feature use occurred in New Orleans than in Cleveland or Washington, DC.

Toward Validation of a Minimal Competence Core of Morphosyntax for African American Children

“…Cultural and language differences between African Americans in the U.S. southern and northern regions, in particular, need to be recognized and considered more often in explanations of their academic performances (Morris & Monroe, 2009). Such regional differences have been reported in the rate of AAE use among elementary school-age children (Charity, 2007) with differential consequences for their written (Charity, Scarborough, & Griffin, 2004), articulatory (Hinton & Pollock, 2000;Stockman, 2008), and pragmatic performances. It is unknown whether regional differences exist in children's general morphosyntactic patterns-thus, one reason for the current study.…”

“…In previous studies, these measures had yielded differences among African American children's language maturity, either directly or indirectly. They included one demographic variable-a northern cohort (MI) and a southern cohort (LA)-that was expected to differ in the rate or density of AAE use (Charity, 2007;Newkirk & Stockman, 2001). The four constitutional variables included gender , age (Owens, 2007), clinical status (Craig & Washington, 2000;Oetting & McDonald, 2001), and the racial composition of the examiners who elicited the language samples (Agerton & Moran, 1995).…”

Geographical Diversity, Residential Segregation, and the Vitality of African American Vernacular English and Its Speakers

“…Fought also notes (2006:60) that European American regional dialects are primarily distinguished by phonetic and phonological features, so the importance of regional phonetic/phonological variation in AAVE should not be downplayed (See Thomas and Yaeger‐Dror 2010). Moreover, as Charity's (2007) Figure 3 shows (reprinted here as Figure 1), there are significant phonological and morphosyntactic differences between the vernacular used by 157 African American children in New Orleans, Cleveland, and Washington, DC, on a sentence imitation and story‐retelling task. The New Orleans children, in particular, show significantly higher frequencies of consonant cluster simplification (reducing the number of consonants, usually at the end of a word), zero possessive, and third person singular –s absence (as in Sam run a lot instead of Sam runs a lot ) than children in the other cities (See also Wolfram 2007).…”

Dialect-Neutral Indices of Narrative Cohesion and Evaluation

“…To ensure the representativeness of the sample, participants came from all over the United States in proportions that approximated the regional distribution of the AA population in the latest census report (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2000). However, regions thought to have higher overall dialect density (Charity, 2007) were oversampled, resulting in the following percentages: South (60%, instead of 51% as in the census), North Central (28% instead of 24%), Northeast (9% instead of 16%), and West (3% instead of 9%).…”