Purpose: This study had 4 primary purposes: (a) to describe the oral narrative performance of typically developing African American prekindergarten children with commonly used macro- and microstructure measures; (b) to examine the concurrent and (c) predictive relations between narrative performance, spoken dialect use, vocabulary, and story…

Purpose: The validity of the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn; Scarborough, 1990) for children who speak African American English (AAE) was evaluated by conducting an item analysis and a comparison of the children's scores as a function of their maternal education level, nonmainstream dialect density, age, and clinical status. Method: The data…

This paper compares respect forms used in Bhojpuri, standard Hindi, and suddh Hindi. The role and use of each dialect are described, and a comparison of respect forms used in each is presented, considering phonemic, grammatical, syntactical, suprasegmental, paralinguistic, and kinesic features. The differences noted appear in a continuum among the…

Linguistic interference as a key factor in the acquisition of reading skills by inner-city black children is explored. Examples of syntactic and phonetic structures in the black dialect which are different from standard English and the role these differences play in beginning reading are given. The use of dialect-based texts allows the child to…

The author describes an approach to teaching reading and writing in which emphasis is on the child's production of language. (Author/JB)

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…

The paper focuses on the linguistic behavior of Negro children concentrated in communities where a non-standard form of English is the accepted currency. Such children are verbal, possess a language fully developed to serve the needs of their "world," and think effectively enough to survive in a sometimes hostile environment. Certain basic…

The purpose of this series of four studies was to precisely describe the code and dialect features of the speech of both lower class Negro children and middle class white children. In the first study, 16 white middle class (WMC) children were compared to 16 Negro lower class (NLC) children on both an imitation and a comprehension task. The WMC…

The language a child learns from and attends to is the speech of significant persons in his world, addressed to each other and to him. As the child gradually participates in this social interaction he learns communicative competence, i.e., the nonconscious, tacit knowledge that underlies speech behavior--knowledge of both the language and the…

Among the papers presented at the 15th Annual Convention of the International Reading Association were the 16 included in this volume. The papers, all dealing with relationships between language and linguistics and reading, reflect both a wide range of opinion on the subject and considerable variety of focus. The six research reports are all…

Among the papers presented at the 15th Annual Convention of the International Reading Association were the 16 included in this volume. The papers, all dealing with relationships between language and linguistics and reading, reflect both a wide range of opinion on the subject and considerable variety of focus. The six research reports are all…

Previous studies have demonstrated that certain differences in speech behavior can be related to the social characteristics of speakers. However, these studies have not explicitly examined the effect of level of linguistic analysis on correlations observed between language variables and status variables. Three levels of analysis of a linguistic…

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…

In dealing with the differences between the school and non-school language of Black children, the author uses a contingency grammar," which considers all speakers of a language to have the identical linguistics competence but includes a level of systematic performance" to account for dialectal and other systematic differences. (FB)

The writer, who feels that the chief differences between Black English (BE) and White English (WE) are phonological and not syntactic, reports on a sociolinguistically oriented examination of that variety of English spoken by children in rural Northern Florida (CBE/Fla). Twenty-two black children between the ages of nine and 12 were taped…