Distinguishing dialectal differences from language disorders in African-American children is a long-standing concern for researchers, educators, and clinicians working with this population. It is a special complication that a common characteristic of language disorders, deletion of copula forms, is also a highly frequent feature of African-American English (AAE). The purpose of this pilot project is to characterize the inclusion and exclusion of the copula, and the syntactic-semantic and pragmatic characteristics of its use in young African-American children. The subjects are 4 1/2 to 5 1/2 year old children from low-income homes who use AAE. A 20-min. freeplay sample of connected discourse will be collected, and analyzed for specific copula types, and for descriptive information about each child's oral expression. A series of copula probes have been developed to create opportunities for the use of low frequency copula forms, and comprehension and cognition will be examined to provide additional descriptive information about the children. T-tests and multivariate analysis procedures will be applied to the data. Outcomes will be examined for systematic differences relative to gender and normal versus disordered language status. The results of this pilot project will advance our understanding of an important AAE dialect form. Understanding the ways in which copula inclusion and exclusion differ for African-American children would improve our ability to establish expectations for language performance with these children, and to recognize disordered patterns of dialect usage.
