College of Behavioral & Social Sciences

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/8

The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..

Browse

Subject: search.filters.subject.African American English

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    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.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The impact of dialect differences on spoken language comprehension
    (Cambridge University Press, 2023-05-02) Byrd, Arynn S.; Huang, Yi Ting; Edwards, Jan
    Research has suggested that children who speak African American English (AAE) have difficulty using features produced in Mainstream American English (MAE) but not AAE, to comprehend sentences in MAE. However, past studies mainly examined dialect features, such as verbal -s, that are produced as final consonants with shorter durations when produced in conversation which impacts their phonetic saliency. Therefore, it is unclear if previous results are due to the phonetic saliency of the feature or how AAE speakers process MAE dialect features more generally. This study evaluated if there were group differences in how AAE- and MAE-speaking children used the auxiliary verbs was and were, a dialect feature with increased phonetic saliency but produced differently between the dialects, to interpret sentences in MAE. Participants aged 6, 5–10, and 0 years, who spoke MAE or AAE, completed the DELV-ST, a vocabulary measure (PVT), and a sentence comprehension task. In the sentence comprehension task, participants heard sentences in MAE that had either unambiguous or ambiguous subjects. Sentences with ambiguous subjects were used to evaluate group differences in sentence comprehension. AAE-speaking children were less likely than MAE-speaking children to use the auxiliary verbs was and were to interpret sentences in MAE. Furthermore, dialect density was predictive of Black participant’s sensitivity to the auxiliary verb. This finding is consistent with how the auxiliary verb is produced between the two dialects: was is used to mark both singular and plural subjects in AAE, while MAE uses was for singular and were for plural subjects. This study demonstrated that even when the dialect feature is more phonetically salient, differences between how verb morphology is produced in AAE and MAE impact how AAE-speaking children comprehend MAE sentences.