Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Development of Dialectal Variation in African American English

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

African American English (AAE) differs from mainstream American English (MAE) syntactically, semantically, and phonologically, but the development of these systems in AAE has received little attention in the literature. For example, both AAE- and MAE-speaking young children use question forms like (1) "What time it is?" and negative statement forms like (2) "I don't want no drink" alongside the MAE forms (1') "What time is it?" and (2') "I don't want a drink". However, whereas MAE-speaking children discontinue use of forms like (1) and (2) as they gain adult competence in MAE, AAE-speaking children continue using them after the MAE-speaking children have stopped doing so. Moreover, since adult AAE employs both (1) and (1') and (2) and (2'), at some point the continued use of the (1) and (2) by AAE-speaking children is not an acquisition error, but adult proficiency in their dialect. That is, child AAE speakers must be able to acquire variation between (1) and (1') and (2) and (2') as part of their linguistic repertoire. This Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award supports comparative research on the development of questions and negations in the dialects of AAE and MAE spoken in New Orleans, Louisiana. Using spontaneous speech and data gathered through experimental task from 5, 6, and 7 year-old participants, this project will shed new light on appropriate developmental stages for AAE, and it will help distinguish variation in child AAE that is developmental from variation that signals successful acquisition of adult question formation and negation. More generally, this research will contribute to understanding the limits of variation across varieties of English at different stages of language development.