This study extended the study of specific language impairments (SLI) to two non-mainstream dialects: a rural version of Southern African American English and a rural version of Southern White English using language samples from 93 4- to 6-year-olds in Louisiana. Findings indicated the surface characteristics of SLI manifested in the two dialects…

Two experiments investigated the mechanism by which listeners adjust their interpretation of accented speech that is similar to a regional dialect of American English. Only a subset of the vowels of English (the front vowels) were shifted during adaptation, which consisted of listening to a 20-min segment of the "Wizard of Oz." Compared…

Studies of Mexican and Puerto Rican communities living in the same United States cities suggest that a combination of historical factors and local conditions strongly influence to what extent these two groups interact and form a shared sense of pan-ethnic Latino unity. However, few studies have examined "MexiRican" individuals, those who…

Using heuristic inquiry, this study investigates how dialect affects the ethnic identity development of the first author as well as fellow Lumbee students attending a predominantly white university. Heuristic inquiry is a process that begins with a question or problem that the researcher seeks to illuminate or answer. Findings from this study…

It is probable that the majority of the 455 000 strong Aboriginal population of Australia speak some form of Australian Aboriginal English (AAE) at least some of the time and that it is the first (and only) language of many Aboriginal children. This means their language is somewhere on a continuum ranging from something very close to Standard…

The Maori language is the language of the indigenous people of New Zealand. Today, not all Maori speak the Maori language, and many Maori as well as non-Maori speak Maori English, the fastest growing of the main varieties of New Zealand English. This paper provides a background to the linguistic situation of the Maori populace in New Zealand,…

This study used data from questionnaires completed by teachers employed in North Carolina schools (N = 370) to determine if teachers felt that non-school-related or school-related factors served as barriers that limited the number of African American male children from participating in gifted programs. The majority of the teachers taught 3rd- to…

Assessed the speed with which children who were speakers of black nonstandard English responded appropriately to sentences presented in their dialect as compared to standard English. Also investigated two grammatical features that differ in standard and nonstandard dialect. Subjects were 96, 5- and 7-year-olds. (Author/SDH)

This is a supplementary dictionary of the Spanish spoken by Chicanos in the states of Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Florida. The nearly 8,000 entries represent a compilation of Chicano words and phrases not typically found in standard dictionaries. Items are listed alphabetically in Spanish, followed by an English…

Spanish spoken in Mexico City is influenced considerably more by indigenous dialects than by archaic or present usage of peninsular Spanish. Six areas in particular fall under this influence: (1) the phoneme "s", treated as a palative and fricative sound, (2) voiced "s", which is dental alveolar and affricate, (3) "t"…

The phenomenon of "cross-code ambiguity" is offered as one explanation of the persistence of such Negro Nonstandard English (NNE) sentences as "The man he did it." In NNE the string "The man did it" is felt to be ambiguous, referring to either "The man who did it..." or, as in Standard English (SE), "The man did it." The use here of the pleonastic…

This study was designed to investigate, describe, and compare the intonation patterns of Black English and Standard English speaking children in a reading (formal) and free discourse (informal) situation. Black English was defined as the linguistic code of the subjects sampled from the inner city black poverty area schools, and Standard English as…

This study examined whether dialect background interferes with the comprehension of school material due to structural and phonological differences and whether reading or listening is a more efficient mode for presentation of school material. The population of 304 black male adolescents was randomly assigned to four groups, and seven passages of…

Two lower socioeconomic groups (one black and one white) from the inner city and a third group of white children from a middle socioeconomic suburban area of Chicago were studied to delineate and compare the usage of selected language structures among children of different social and ethnic backgrounds. Usage of each of the test structures was…

The purpose of this study was to examine how two different speech varieties used during an oral reading and recall task influenced primary grade teachers' evaluations of reading comprehension and how teachers' attitudes toward Black English related to their evaluations. (Author/PN)