This article examines the language and cognitive skills of bidialectal and bilingual children, focusing on African American English bidialectal speakers and Spanish-English bilingual speakers. It contributes to the discussion by considering two themes in the extant literature: (1) linguistic and cognitive strengths can be found in speaking two…

This thesis examines the role of the African substrate languages in the emergence of Atlantic Creole grammatical structures. Alleyne (1980) and Faraclas (1990) have convincingly demonstrated that a survey of the grammatical features that typify the Colonial Era English-Lexifier Creoles of the Atlantic reveals remarkable similarities with those…

The present article compares and contrasts linguistic findings from longitudinal studies of low-income Americans derived from evidence of recorded family speech interactions. Hart and Risley (1995) employed research assistants who spent 1 hour per month observing language usage among families from different socioeconomic backgrounds in their homes…

This experiment measured teachers' attitudes towards African American English and Academic English. Participants were graduate students of Education at a college in New York City. They completed a paper-and-pencil questionnaire that assessed their explicit attitudes towards the two varieties, as well as a Psycholinguistic Experiment that was…

This study tests the extent to which giving credit for African American English (AAE) responses on a General American English sentence imitation test mitigates dialect effects. Forty-eight AAE-speaking second graders completed the Recalling Sentences subtest of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Third Edition (1995). A Bayesian…

The Black English semi-auxiliary "come" is used to express speaker indignation, as opposed to the motion verb "come." Examines the history of the semi-auxiliary and why it has remained undetected for so long. (EKN)

This paper documents a coding system developed to facilitate the investigation of linguistic variation in Black English. The rationale for employment of such a system is given. The use of the coding system in a study of child Black English is described and the codes for 41 phonological and syntactic variables investigated in the study are…

This article surveys the literature on Ebonics that was published from 1865 to 1975. The linguistic features of Ebonics are categorized into phonological, systactical, and lexical groupings. (Author)

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, November 1970, in Los Angeles, California. (DS)

Various trends in linguistics research as they are currently applied to reading instruction are described. The rationale of both Bloomfield and Fries stressing the alphabetic principle of sound-letter correspondence is evaluated, and research comparing the effectiveness of applying this principle with other approaches to beginning reading is…

Essays on the history of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) include: an introduction to the evolution of AAVE within the African American diaspora (Shana Poplack); "Rephrasing the Copula: Contraction and Zero in Early African American English" (James A. Walker); "Reconstructing the Source of Early African American English…

Report of research findings on productive language differences in beginning fifth grade Black children living in Philadelphia, as evidenced by their use of nonstandard syntactic forms in both speech and writing. (RB)

No evidence was found to indicate that grammatical reading interference is an important factor in the poor reading achievement of Black youngsters. (JH)

This study examined the syntax of the naturalistic speech of 15 three-to-five-year-old urban, lower-class black children, to determine (1) their syntactic maturity compared to white middle-class children of the same age, as measured by mean utterance length, types of transformations used, and number of sentence-combining transformations per t-unit…

A description of the linguistic characteristics of casual conversations of Los Angeles Negro K-3 school children was recorded outside the classroom in small groups with two to five participants. Analysis of phonological, syntactic, and lexical characteristics discloses considerable variation in the children's speech, exhibiting both a significant…