Grammaticality Judgments of Tense and Agreement by Child Speakers of African American English: Effects of Clinical Status, Surface Form, and Grammatical Structure.

ABSTRACT:

Purpose

We examined the grammaticality judgments of tense and agreement (T/A) structures by children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) within African American English (AAE). The children's judgments of T/A forms were also compared to their judgments of two control forms and, for some analyses, examined by surface form (i.e., overt, zero) and type of structure (i.e., BE, past tense, verbal -s).

Method

The judgments were from 91 AAE-speaking kindergartners (DLD = 34; typically developing = 57), elicited using items from the Rice/Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment. The data were analyzed twice, once using General American English as the reference and A' scores and once using AAE as the reference and percentages of acceptability.

Results</

SUBMITTER: Vaughn LE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10457090 | biostudies-literature | 2023 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature