Measuring Language Competence in AA Children who are High Dialect Speakers

测量高方言 AA 儿童的语言能力

• 批准号: 10687318
• 负责人: Lee Branum-Martin
• 金额: $ 17.51万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-IRVINE
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-09-01 至 2024-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10687318
• 关键词: African American; American; Categories; Characteristics; Child; Clinical; Competence; Comprehension; Differential Diagnosis; Factor Analysis; Failure; Household; Investigation; Judgment; Knowledge; Language; Language Development; Language Disorders; Learning; Linguistics; Mainstreaming; Measurement; Measures; Methods; Modeling; Morphology; Outcome; Performance; Population; Poverty; Psycholinguistics; Psychometrics; Reading; Research; Research Project Summaries; Risk; Sampling; Structure; System; Testing; Text; Work; Writing; base; bilingualism; cognitive load; density; experience; fifth grade; instrument; language impairment; language processing; response; skills; social culture; socioeconomics; sociolinguistics; theories

PROJECT SUMMARY Research has identified the presence of African American English (AAE) as a complicating factor for assessment of the language skills of African American (AA) children. AAE is a major dialect of American English (AE), spoken by approximately 12% of the U.S. population. In clinical contexts, AAE overlaps with the linguistic characteristics documented for language impairments, making differentiation of language disorders and language differences difficult. In academic contexts, the mismatch hypothesis posits that the poor match between spoken language and text puts AAE-speaking children at risk for reading failure. Recent research has demonstrated that it is not the mere presence of AAE that leads to poor outcomes. Instead, it is the occurrence of high amounts of AAE that matters most. AAE use occurs on a continuum from low to high dialect use. Converging evidence from studies of dialect, language, reading and writing, have identified high dialect users as those AAE speakers who are at risk for failure or poor performances on a range of language-based instruments and tasks; low to moderate dialect users, on the other hand, do not evidence this same risk. Thus, it appears that it is the linguistic distance between the spoken standard and the language used by AAE dialect users that contributes to these high rates of difficulty. We propose that the impact of this distance on assessment in particular has resulted in underestimation of the linguistic competence of AA children, particularly those growing up in poverty, who are most likely to be dense users of AAE. It is therefore crucial to distinguish linguistic competence from linguistic performance when assessing high-density speakers of AAE. Accordingly, the Specific Aims of this project are: Aim 1: To explore measurement of language competence utilizing traditional psycholinguistic methods, (i.e., sentence repetition, grammatical judgment, and sentence building) within a sample of 450 African American children in 3rd through 5th grades who speak AAE. Aim 2: To develop a scoring rubric that supports both Mainstream American English (MAE) and AAE responding and that is useful for characterizing the language knowledge of children who are typically developing, dense AAE speakers. We will use confirmatory factor analysis for categorical items (i.e., item response theory) to test the experimental scales as well as to test the expected theoretical structure against the scores on other, established measures for convergent and discriminant validity.

项目概要 研究发现非裔美式英语 (AAE) 的存在是一个复杂的因素 评估非裔美国 (AA) 儿童的语言技能。 AAE 是美国的主要方言 英语 (AE)，大约有 12% 的美国人使用。在临床背景下，AAE 与 记录语言障碍的语言特征，区分语言障碍 和语言差异很困难。在学术背景下，失配假说假设较差的匹配 口语和文本之间的差异使讲 AAE 的儿童面临阅读失败的风险。最近的研究有 证明导致不良结果的不仅仅是 AAE 的存在。相反，它是发生 最重要的是大量 AAE。 AAE 的使用是从方言使用率低到高的连续过程。 来自方言、语言、阅读和写作研究的综合证据已经确定了高方言使用者 作为那些在一系列基于语言的学习中面临失败或表现不佳风险的 AAE 使用者 仪器和任务；另一方面，低到中度方言用户并没有表现出同样的风险。因此， 看来这是口语标准与 AAE 方言使用的语言之间的语言距离 造成这些高难度的用户。我们建议这个距离的影响 特别是评估导致了对 AA 儿童语言能力的低估， 尤其是那些在贫困中长大的人，他们最有可能是 AAE 的密集使用者。因此至关重要的是 在评估 AAE 的高密度说话者时，区分语言能力和语言表现。 因此，该项目的具体目标是： 目标 1：探索语言能力的测量 利用传统的心理语言学方法（即句子重复、语法判断和句子 大楼）以 450 名 3 至 5 年级讲 AAE 的非裔美国儿童为样本。目标 2： 制定支持主流美式英语 (MAE) 和 AAE 回应的评分标准，并且 对于描述通常正在发展、密集的 AAE 的儿童的语言知识非常有用 扬声器。我们将使用分类项目的验证性因素分析（即项目反应理论）来测试 实验尺度以及根据其他分数测试预期的理论结构， 制定了收敛和区分有效性的措施。