Does Rare Vocabulary Use Distinguish Giftedness From Typical Development? A Study of School-Age African American Narrators.
OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this study was to examine rare vocabulary produced in the spoken narratives of school-age African American children.


METHODS
Forty-three children from general and gifted classrooms produced 2 narratives: a personal story and a fictional story that was based on the wordless book Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969). The Wordlist for Expressive Rare Vocabulary Evaluation (Mahurin-Smith, DeThorne, & Petrill, 2015) was used to tally number and type of uncommon words produced in these narratives. The authors used t tests and logistic regressions to explore classroom- and narrative-type differences in rare vocabulary production. Correlational analysis determined the relationship between dialect variation and rare vocabulary production.


RESULTS
Findings indicated that tallies of rare-word types were higher in fictional narratives, whereas rare-word density-a measure that controls for narrative length-was greater in personal narratives. Rare-word density distinguished children in general classrooms from those in gifted classrooms. There was no correlation between dialect variation and rare-word density.


CONCLUSIONS
Examining school-age African American children's facility with rare vocabulary production appears to be a dialect-neutral way to measure their narrative language and to distinguish gifted children from typically developing children.
The Ohio State University, Columbus.
Monique T
MT
Mills
Illinois State University, Normal.
Jamie
J
Mahurin-Smith
Saint Louis University, MO.
Sara C
SC
Steele
D001741:Black or African American / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D002672:Child, Gifted / Q000523:psychology*; D018864:Cultural Diversity; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007087:Illinois; D008297:Male; D033262:Narration; D012016:Reference Values; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D014825:Vocabulary