Dialectal forms during discourse of poor, urban, African American preschoolers.
This study describes nonstandard syntactic and morphological forms used by 45 poor, urban, 4- to 5.5-year-old African American boys and girls. Distributional analyses revealed three subgroups distinguished by the percentage frequencies of occurrence of utterances containing specific forms, and by the predominant types used by each group. Implications for characterizing the linguistic productions of young African American children are discussed.
Communicative Disorders Clinic, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 48109-2054.
J A
JA
Washington
H K
HK
Craig
D001741:Black or African American; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D014481:United States; D014705:Verbal Behavior