Toward validation of a minimal competence core of morphosyntax for African American children.

PURPOSE: The authors set out to determine (a) whether African American children's spontaneous spoken language met use criteria for a revised minimal competence core with original and added morphosyntactic patterns at different geographical locations, and (b) whether pass/fail status on this core was differentiated on other criterion measures of language maturity. METHOD: The authors used a common set of activities and stimuli to elicit spontaneous speech samples from Head Start students, age 3;0 (years; months). The 119 participants were distributed at a northern (Lansing, MI) and a southern (Baton Rouge, LA) location. RESULTS: More than 80% of the children at each location met criteria for 10 core competencies. They included sentence length, type, complexity, and morphosyntactic elaborations of sentences at the lexical, phrasal, and clausal levels. The 2 most significant predictors of pass/fail outcomes in a regression analysis were (a) clinical referral status and (b) the number of different words (NDW(100)) spoken in a speech sample. CONCLUSION: A minimal competence core analyses of spontaneous oral language samples may help to identify delayed spoken grammars in African American children.

The use of conversational repairs by African American preschoolers.

PURPOSE: This study aimed to describe the types and frequency of conversational repairs used by African American (AA) children in relationship to their geographic locations and levels of performance on commonly used speech-language measures. METHOD: The strategies used to initiate repairs and respond to repair requests were identified in audiovisual records of spontaneous speech sampled from 120 Head Start students in Michigan (n = 69) and Louisiana (n = 51) at 3 years of age. The 30-40-min samples were elicited with common stimuli and activities while the children interacted with an adult examiner. RESULTS: All participants initiated repairs and responded to examiner requests for conversational repairs. Some repair strategies were observed more often than others. The frequency, but not the types, of some of the strategies used varied significantly with participant location and level of speech-language performance. CONCLUSION: AA children used the same types of conversational repair strategies that have been observed among young speakers of Standard English varieties. CLINICAL IMPLICATION: Use of conversational repairs should be included among the pragmatic behaviors expected for 3-year-old AA children.