Theoretical and Empirical Bases for Dialect-Neutral Language Assessment: Contributions from Theoretical and Applied Linguistics to Communication Disorders

Three avenues of theoretical research provide insights for discovering abstract properties of language that are subject to disorder and amenable to assessment: (1) the study of universal grammar and its acquisition; (2) descriptions of African American English (AAE) Syntax, Semantics, and Phonology within theoretical linguistics; and (3) the study of specific language impairment (SLI) cross-linguistically. Abstract linguistic concepts were translated into a set of assessment protocols that were used to establish normative data on language acquisition (developmental milestones) in typically developing AAE children ages 4 to 9 years. Testing AAE-speaking language impaired (LI) children and both typically developing (TD) and LI Mainstream American English (MAE)-learning children on these same measures provided the data to select assessments for which (1) TD MAE and AAE children performed the same, and (2) TD performance was reliably different from LI performance in both dialect groups.

Universal grammar - unique structures of AAE syntax - cross-linguistic study of LI - developmental milestones

REFERENCES

• 1 Labov W. The logic of non-standard English. In: Williams F Language and Poverty Chicago; Markham 1970: 153-189
• 2 Wolfram W, Fasold R W. The Study of Social Dialects in American English. Englewood Cliffs, NJ; Prentice Hall 1974
• 3 Craig H K, Washington J A. The complex syntax skills of poor, urban, African American preschoolers at school entry.  Lang Speech Hear Serv Sch. 1994;  25 181-190
• 4 Washington J A, Craig H. Morphosyntactic forms of African American English used by young children and their caregivers.  Appl Psycholinguist. 2002;  23 209-231
• 5 Wolfram W. Dialects and American English. Englewood Cliffs, NJ; Prentice Hall 1991
• 6 Chomsky N. Conditions on transformations. In: Anderson S, Kiparsky P A Festschrift for Morris Halle. New York; Holt, Rinehart, and Winston 1973: 232-286
• 7 Chomsky N. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA; MIT Press 1995
• 8 Prince A, Smolensky P. Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Piscataway, NJ; Center for Cognitive Science Rutgers University Technical Report 2 1999
• 9 Archangeli D, Langedoen T Optimality Theory: An Overview. Malden, MA; Blackwell 1997
• 10 Bryant T, Abdulkarim L, Velleman S, Seymour H. Predictors of consonant cluster reduction in African American English. Paper presented at: the Annual Meeting of the American Speech Language Association Atlanta; Nov. 21-24, 2002
• 11 Charko T, Velleman S. The influence of dialect on children's phonotactic constraint rankings. Poster presented at: the Child Phonology Conference, University of British Columbia July 3-9, 2003
• 12 Roeper T. Diagnosing language variations: underlying principles for syntactic assessment.  Semin Speech Lang. 2004;  25 41-56
• 13 Ross J R. Constraints on Variables in Syntax. Dissertation MIT, Cambridge, MA; 1967
• 14 Chomsky N. On wh-movement. In: Culicover PW, Wasow T, Akmajian A Formal Syntax New York; Academic Press 1977: 71-132
• 15 Chomsky N. Barriers. Cambridge, MA; MIT Press 1986
• 16 Otsu Y. Universal Grammar and Syntactic Development in Children: Toward a Theory of Syntactic Development. Dissertation MIT, Cambridge, MA; 1981
• 17 de Villiers J G, Roeper T, Vainikka A. The acquisition of long-distance rules. In: Frazier L, de Villiers J Language Processing and Language Acquisition Boston; Kluwer Academic 1990: 257-297
• 18 Bland L, de Villiers J, Roeper T, Champion T, Seymour H N. Wh-movement in children of divergent language backgrounds. Presented at: the Annual Meeting of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association San Antonio, TX; Nov 19-23, 1992
• 19 Roeper T, de Villiers J G. Lexical links in the wh-chain. In: Lust B, Hermon G, Kornfilt J Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives. Vol. II: Binding, Dependencies, and Learnability Hillsdale, NJ; Lawrence Erlbaum 1994: 357-390
• 20 Coles D. Barrier Constraints on Negative Concord in African American English. Dissertation University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA; 1998
• 21 Green L. Topics in African American English: The Verb System. Dissertation University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA; 1993
• 22 Green L. African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge, MA; Cambridge University Press 2002
• 23 Terry J M. On the Articulation of Aspectual Meaning in African-American English [dissertation]. 2002
• 24 Jackson J. Linguistic Aspect in African-American English-Speaking Children: An Investigation of Aspectual “Be”. Dissertation University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA; 1998
• 25 Wyatt T A. Linguistic Constraints on Copula Production in Black English Child Speech. Dissertation University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA; 1991
• 26 Dayton E. Grammatical Categories of the Verb in African American Vernacular English. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 1996
• 27 Leonard L, Eyer J, Bedore L, Grela B. Three accounts of the grammatical morpheme difficulties of English-speaking children with specific language impairment.  J Speech Lang Hear Res. 1997;  40 741-753
• 28 Rice M, Wexler K. Toward tense as a clinical marker of specific language impairment in English-speaking children.  J Speech Lang Hear Res. 1996;  39 239-257
• 29 Leonard L B. Specific language impairment: characterizing the deficit. In: Levy Y, Schaeffer J Language Competence Across Populations: Toward a Definition of SLI Mahwah, NJ; Lawrence Erlbaum 2002: 209-232
• 30 Bedore L, Leonard L. Specific language impairment and grammatical morphology: a discriminant function analysis.  J Speech Lang Hear Res. 1998;  41 1185-1192
• 31 Leonard L, Miller C, Gerber E. Grammatical morphology and the lexicon in children with specific language impairment.  J Speech Lang Hear Res. 1999;  42 678-689
• 32 Jakubowicz C. About the nature of the linguistic deficit in SLI. Paper presented at: Symposium on the Acquisition of Functional Categories in French across Learner Contexts, IASCL, University of Wisconsin Madison, WI; July 16-21, 2002
• 33 Clahsen H, Hansen D. The grammatical agreement deficit in specific language impairment: evidence from therapy experiments. In: Gopnik M The Biological Basis of Language Oxford, UK; Oxford University Press 1997: 148-168
• 34 Jakubowicz C, Nash L, Rigant G et al.. Determiners and clitic pronouns in French-speaking children with SLI.  Lang Acquis. 1998;  7 113-160
• 35 Paradis J, Crago M, Genesee F. Object clitics in bilingual and monolingual French-speaking children with SLI. Paper presented at: the Symposium on Morphosyntactic Deficits in Children with SLI: Crosslinguistic and Bilingual Perspectives, IASCL-SRCLD [International Association for the Study of Child Language-Symposium on Research on Child Language Disorders], University of Wisconsin-Madison July 16-21, 2002
• 36 Jakubowicz C. What specific language impairment in French (Romance) can tell us about the computational component of the language faculty and its development. Abstract available at http://adur.let.rug.nl/~goins/abstracts/jakubowicz.html, accessed on 2/26/04
• 37 Vainikka A, Roeper T. Abstract operators in early acquisition.  Linguist Rev. 1995;  12 275-310
• 38 Roeper T. The acquisition of implicit arguments and the distinction between theory, process, and mechanism. In: MacWhinney B Mechanisms of Language Acquisition Hillsdale, NJ; Lawrence Erlbaum 1987: 309-343
• 39 de Villiers P. Assessing English syntax in hearing-impaired children: eliciting production in pragmatically-motivated situations. In: Kretschmer R, Kretschmer L Communication Assessment of Hearing-Impaired Students. Academy of Rehabilitative Audiology, Monograph Supplement Vol 2 1988: 41-72
• 40 Mattei E, Roeper T. On the acquisition of “all” and “some”.  Papers and Reports on Child Lang Dev. 1975;  9 63-74
• 41 Philip W. Event quantification in the acquisition of universal quantification. Dissertation University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA; 1995
• 42 Crain S, Thornton R. Investigations in Universal Grammar: A Guide to Experiments on the Acquisition of Syntax and Semantics. Cambridge, MA; The MIT Press 1998
• 43 Schafer R J, de Villiers J. Imagining articles: What ‘a’ and ‘the’ can tell us about the emergence of DP. In: Howell SC, Fish SA, Keith-Lucas T BUCLD 24: Proceedings of the 24th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development Vol. 2 Boston, MA; Cascadilla Press 2000: 609-620
• 44 Waxman S R, Hatch T. Beyond the basics: preschool children label objects flexibly at multiple hierarchical levels.  J Child Lang. 1992;  19 153-166
• 45 Seymour H N. The invisible children: a reply to Lahey's perspective.  J Speech Hear Res. 1992;  35 640-641
• 46 Seymour H N, Roeper T. Grammatical acquisition of African American English. In: Taylor O, Leonard LB Language Acquisition across North America: Cross-Cultural and Cross-Linguistic Perspectives San Diego; Singular 1999: 109-153
• 47 Craig H K. The challenges of conducting language research with African American children. In: Kamhi A, Pollock K, Harris J Communication Development and Disorders in African American Children: Research, Assessment, and Intervention Baltimore; Paul H. Brookes 1996: 1-18
• 48 Craig H K, Thompson C A, Washington J A, Potter S L. Phonological features of child African American English.  J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2003;  46 623-635
• 49 Washington J A, Craig H K. Socioeconomic status and gender influences on children's dialectal variations.  J Speech Lang Hear Res. 1998;  41 618-626
• 50 Stockman I J. Semantic development of African American children. In: Taylor OL, Leonard LB Language Acquisition across North America: Cross-Cultural and Cross-Linguistic Perspectives San Diego; Singular 1999: 61-109
• 51 Current Population Survey: School Enrollment Supplemental File [CD ROM]. Washington DC; US Bureau of the Census 2000
• 52 University of Massachusetts Working Group on African American English .Development Milestones for AAE Speaking 4-, 5-, 6-Year-Olds. Unpublished report Amherst, MA; 2002
• 53 Strauss U, Roeper T, Pearson B Z, Seymour H. Acquisition of universality in wh-questions. Paper presented at: the Generative Linguistics in the Old World Conference Lund, Sweden; April 9-11, 2003