The aim of this study was to determine if dialect status has an effect on the frequency at which kindergarteners produce nonmainstream English markings for regular third person, IS and ARE, and regular past tense when producing oral narratives. Specifically, I wished to determine if child speakers of African American English (AAE) and child speakers of Southern White English (SWE) mark these structures with nonmainstream English forms at different rates. The narrative data came from language samples that had been previously collected from twenty kindergarten speakers of AAE and twenty kindergarten speakers of SWE. All of the children were recruited from various primary schools in rural Louisiana, and their dialect status was confirmed with a listener judgment task. The narratives were elicited by asking the children to produce narratives based on three to four pictures. Their narratives were then transcribed and coded. Once the narratives were transcribed, the target grammar structures were coded as mainstream overt, nonmainstream overt, or nonmainstream zero. The rate of nonmainstream marking was calculated by dividing each childs number of nonmainstream overt and nonmainstream zero markings by the total number of opportunities that each child had to produce the structures.
For all three grammar structures, the AAE-speaking children producing higher rates of nonmainstream marking than their SWE-speaking peers. Additionally, it was found that both groups were more likely to produce nonmainstream forms with the auxiliary than copular BE form. These findings suggest that the rate of nonmainstream marking in narratives differs based on a childs dialect status in ways that are consistent with what has been documented in studies of conversational language samples.
However, by comparing the current results to a previous study of the grammatical structures produced in conversation, it was found that narratives were more likely to elicit past tense structures while conversations were more likely to elicit present tense structures.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-04022014-194729 |
| Date | 10 April 2014 |
| Creators | Love, Andromeda Patrice |
| Contributors | Gibson, Todd, Norris, Jan, Oetting, Janna |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04022014-194729/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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