Hearing & Speech Sciences Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2776
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Item UNDERSTANDING HOW AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH-SPEAKING CHILDREN USE INFLECTIONAL VERB MORPHOLOGY IN SENTENCE PROCESSING AND WORD LEARNING(2024) Byrd, Arynn S; Edwards, Jan; Huang, Yi Ting; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research examined how linguistic differences between African American English (AAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE) impact how children process sentences and learn new information. The central hypothesis of this dissertation is that these linguistic differences adversely impact how AAE-speaking children use contrastive inflectional verb morphology (e.g., was/were, third person singular -s) to process and comprehend MAE sentences, as well as to infer word meanings when they depend on dialect-specific parsing of sentence cues. To test this hypothesis, this dissertation conducted three experiments on how linguistic mismatch impacts spoken language comprehension and word learning in school-age MAE- and AAE-speaking children. The first study examined how children used the auxiliary verbs was or were to comprehend MAE sentences in an offline spoken language comprehension task. In contrast, the second study asked the same question in an online sentence processing task. The final study examined how children used inflectional verb morphology (i.e., third-person singular -s, was/were) to infer information about novel verbs. Each study examined how participants’ dialect, either MAE or AAE, predicted performance on listening tasks produced in MAE. Furthermore, each study examined how individual differences such as age, dialect density, and vocabulary size influenced children’s performance.Across all studies, results demonstrated that when there were redundant linguistic cues that were not impacted by dialect differences, AAE- and MAE-speaking children used available linguistic cues to process and comprehend spoken language and infer verb meanings in a similar manner. However, when linguistic redundancy was decreased due to perceptual ambiguity, there were group differences in how AAE- and MAE-speaking children used inflectional verb morphology on spoken language tasks. The second study showed that AAE-speaking children were sensitive to contrastive verb morphology in real-time processing, but they were less likely than their MAE-speaking peers to use it as an informative cue to revise initial parses when processing spoken language. The results of the final study indicated that individual characteristics such as age and dialect density influence how dialect impacts a learning process. These results demonstrate that linguistic mismatch can affect spoken language processes. Furthermore, the findings from this research highlight a complex relationship between the effects of linguistic mismatch and individual differences such as age and dialect density.Item ISOLATING EFFECTS OF PERCEPTUAL ANALYSIS AND SOCIOCULTURAL CONTEXT ON CHILDREN’S COMPREHENSION OF TWO DIALECTS OF ENGLISH, AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH AND GENERAL AMERICAN ENGLISH(2023) Erskine, Michelle E; Edwards, Jan; Huang, Yi Ting; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)There is a long-standing gap in literacy achievement between African American and European American students (e.g., NAEP, 2019, 2022). A large body of research has examined different factors that continue to reinforce performance differences across students. One variable that has been a long-term interest to sociolinguists and applied scientists is children’s use of different dialects in the classroom. Many African American students speak African American English (AAE), a rule-governed, but socially stigmatized, dialect of English that differs in phonology, morphosyntax, and pragmatics from General American English (GAE), the dialect of classroom instruction. Empirical research on dialect variation and literacy achievement has demonstrated that linguistic differences between dialects make it more difficult to learn to read (Buhler et al., 2018; Charity et al., 2004; Gatlin & Wanzek, 2015; Washington et al., 2018, inter alia) and recently, more difficult to comprehend spoken language (Byrd et al., 2022, Edwards et al., 2014; Erskine, 2022a; Johnson, 2005; de Villiers & Johnson, 2007; JM Terry, Hendrick, Evangelou, et al., 2010; JM Terry, Thomas, Jackson, et al., 2022). The prevailing explanation for these results has been the perceptual analysis hypothesis, a framework that asserts that linguistic differences across dialects creates challenges in mapping variable speech signals to listeners’ stored mental representations (Adank et al., 2009; Clopper, 2012; Clopper & Bradlow, 2008; Cristia et al., 2012). However, spoken language comprehension is more than perceptual analysis, requiring the integration of perceptual information with communicative intent and sociocultural information (speaker identity). To this end, it is proposed that the perceptual analysis hypothesis views dialect variation as another form of signal degradation. Simplifying dialect variation to a signal-mapping problem potentially limits our understanding of the contribution of dialect variation to spoken language comprehension. This dissertation proposes that research on spoken language comprehension should integrate frameworks that are more sensitive to the contributions of the sociocultural aspects of dialect variation, such as the role of linguistic and nonlinguistic cues that are associated with speakers of different dialects. This dissertation includes four experiments that use the visual world paradigm to explore the effects of dialect variation on spoken language comprehension among children between the ages of 3;0 to 11;11 years old (years;months) from two linguistic communities, European American speakers of GAE and African American speakers with varying degrees of exposure to AAE and GAE. Chapter 2 (Erskine [2022a]) investigates the effects of dialect variation in auditory-only contexts in two spoken word recognition tasks that vary in linguistic complexity: a) word recognition in simple phrases and b) word recognition in sentences that vary in semantic predictability. Chapter 3 [Erskine (2022b)] examine the effects of visual and auditory speaker identity cues on dialect variation on literal semantic comprehension (i.e., word recognition in semantically facilitating sentences). Lastly, Chapter 4 [Erskine (2022c)] examines the effects of visual and auditory speaker identity cues on children’s comprehension of different dialects in a task that evaluates pragmatic inferencing (i.e., scalar implicature). Each of the studies investigate the validity of the perceptual analysis against sociolinguistcally informed hypotheses that account for the integration of linguistic and nonlinguistic speaker identity cues as adequate explanations for relationships that are observed between dialect variation and spoken language comprehension. Collectively, these studies address the question of how dialect variation impacts spoken language comprehension. This dissertation provides evidence that traditional explanations that focus on perceptual costs are limited in their ability to account for correlations typically reported between spoken language comprehension and dialect use. Additionally, it shows that school-age children rapidly integrate linguistic and nonlinguistic socioindexical cues in ways that meaningfully guide their comprehension of different speakers. The implication of these findings and future research directions are also addressed within.