B. Z. Pearson, S. L. Velleman, T. J. Bryant, and T. Charko (2009) demonstrated phonological differences in typically developing children learning African American English as their first dialect vs. General American English only. Extending this research to children with speech sound disorders (SSD) has key implications for intervention. A total of…

Purpose: To examine lexical knowledge in children through a fast mapping task. Method: This study compared the performance of 60 African American English-speaking and general American English-speaking children between the ages of 4 and 6 years. They were presented with a comprehension task involving the fast mapping of novel verbs in 4 different…

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…

Purpose: Facilitating language development in children with specific language impairment (SLI) who are learning African American English (AAE) as their first dialect requires clinicians to consider grammatical, lexical, and cultural differences. The purpose of this article is to examine 2 intervention methods that have an extensive history of…

Purpose: The well-known decline in the use of African American English (AAE) features by groups of school-aged AAE-speaking children was reexamined for patterns of overt-, zero-, and mixed-marking for individual features and individual speakers. Methods: Seven hundred twenty-nine typically developing children between the ages of 4 and 12--511…

This article encourages educators and speech-language pathologists to look beyond the language of African American English speakers for an explanation of the Black-White achievement gap in education. A brief historical overview shows that the attention to the performance of African American children in school began many years ago but gained…

This article describes the use of African American English (AAE) in the written and oral language of African American adolescents who struggle with writing. Written and oral language samples of 22 African American 10th-grade students were transcribed, analyzed, and coded for AAE, grammatical errors, spelling errors, and punctuation errors. Four…

Purpose: Research has established that African American (AA) children are lagging behind other children in their reading skills. A number of factors have been proposed to account for the literacy gap; however no single factor has entirely explained this disparity. This investigation examined the appropriateness of the Gray Oral Reading Test-Fourth…