This thesis presents a comprehensive phonological analysis of the Weledeh dialect of Dogrib, a Northern Athabaskan language spoken in the Northwest Territories, Canada, based on the author's own fieldwork. The phonology of Northern Athabaskan languages, and Dogrib in particular, has to date been regarded as highly irregular, and subject to…

This article gives an overview of dictionaries of African sign languages that have been published to date most of which have not been widely distributed. After an introduction into the field of sign language lexicography and a discussion of some of the obstacles that authors of sign language dictionaries face in general, I will show problems…

The linguistic profile of people with Autism spectrum disorders typically involves intact perceptual processing, accompanied by deficits in the social functions of language. In a series of three experiments, the impact of this profile on the perception of regional dialect was examined. Young adults with High-Functioning Autism exhibited similar…

Many studies have shown that verb inflections are difficult to produce for agrammatic aphasic speakers: they are frequently omitted and substituted. The present article gives an overview of our search to understanding why this is the case. The hypothesis is that grammatical morphology referring to the past is selectively impaired in agrammatic…

Purpose: To report preliminary comparisons of developing structural and dialectal characteristics associated with fictional and personal narratives in school-age African American children. Method: Forty-three children, Grades 2-5, generated a fictional narrative and a personal narrative in response to a wordless-book elicitation task and a…

Purpose: To investigate regional dialect variation in the vowel systems of typically developing 8- to 12-year-old children. Method: Thirteen vowels in isolated "h_d" words were produced by 94 children and 93 adults (males and females). All participants spoke American English and were born and raised in 1 of 3 distinct dialect regions in…

Flanders, the northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, is experiencing growing intra- and interlingual diversity. On the intralingual level, Tussentaal ("in-between-language") has emerged as a cluster of intermediate varieties between the Flemish dialects and Standard Dutch, gradually becoming "the" colloquial language. At the…

Research suggests that passing for a native English speaker (NES) is often perceived as desirable by teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and employers, and students may claim to prefer certain NES accents as learning models. While this may be partly motivated by the prevalence of a particular regional accent in ESL contexts or…

In this article, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa critique appropriateness-based approaches to language diversity in education. Those who subscribe to these approaches conceptualize standardized linguistic practices as an objective set of linguistic forms that are appropriate for an academic setting. In contrast, Flores and Rosa highlight the…

African American English has a rich oral tradition, with identifiable features across all 5 systems of language--phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. This is an investigation of the extent to which pragmatic features of African American oral storytelling traditions are apparent in the written stories of African American…

Mexicanos/Chicanos in the United States have historically suffered derision and mistreatment by the mainstream culture because of their use of nonstandard Spanish and English, as well as codeswitching (alternating between two or more languages or language varieties). In the field of education, codeswitching and the use of nonstandard English and…

There is a growing interest in the quandary of literacy and proficiency amongst K-12 students in the United States. Similarly, because of uncharted research about biliteracy amongst African-American students in urban schools and benefits of Spanish fluency, communicative gaps are increased and fluency is breached. If advantages are properly…

Improving minority academic achievement is a primary goal for education policy makers. Despite resource allocations, gaps in minority accomplishments persist. Emerging research suggests language variety may hinder minority students, thereby slowing academic progress. This article synthesizes suggestions from a panel composed of experts in the…

With the demographic shifts in the United States, it is increasingly the case that speech-language pathologists (SLPs) come from different language backgrounds from those of their clients and have nonnative accents in their languages of service. An anonymous web-based survey was completed by students and clinic directors in SLP training programs…

This dissertation examines the acquisition of object clitic placement in Standard Italian by heritage speakers (HSs) of non-standard Italian dialects. It compares two different groups of Standard Italian learners--Northern Italian dialect HSs and Southern Italian dialect HSs--whose heritage dialects contrast with each other in clitic word order.…