title: Toward validation of a minimal competence core of morphosyntax for African American children.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The authors set out to determine (a) whether African American children's spontaneous spoken language met use criteria for a revised minimal competence core with original and added morphosyntactic patterns at different geographical locations, and (b) whether pass/fail status on this core was differentiated on other criterion measures of language maturity.
  
  
  METHODS
  The authors used a common set of activities and stimuli to elicit spontaneous speech samples from Head Start students, age 3;0 (years; months). The 119 participants were distributed at a northern (Lansing, MI) and a southern (Baton Rouge, LA) location.
  
  
  RESULTS
  More than 80% of the children at each location met criteria for 10 core competencies. They included sentence length, type, complexity, and morphosyntactic elaborations of sentences at the lexical, phrasal, and clausal levels. The 2 most significant predictors of pass/fail outcomes in a regression analysis were (a) clinical referral status and (b) the number of different words (NDW(100)) spoken in a speech sample.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  A minimal competence core analyses of spontaneous oral language samples may help to identify delayed spoken grammars in African American children.
authors.affiliation: Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA. stockma1@msu.edu
authors.forename: Ida J
authors.initials: IJ
authors.lastname: Stockman
authors.forename: Barbara
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Guillory
authors.forename: Marilyn
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Seibert
authors.forename: Johanna
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Boult
mesh_terms: D001741:Black or African American; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D015331:Cohort Studies; D018479:Early Intervention, Educational / Q000592:standards; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D007807:Language Tests / Q000592:standards*; D008037:Linguistics / Q000592:standards*; D008297:Male; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D013060:Speech; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014705:Verbal Behavior