The proposed research examines the relationship between fast mapping and syntactic bootstrapping in African American English (AAE) and Standard American English (SAE) speaking children, and the extent to which morphosyntactic cues assist children in the learning of new verbs. Current methods for assessing AAE speaking children's semantic knowledge are seriously flawed. Many AAE speaking children who do not have language disorders perform poorly on standardized vocabulary tests. There is no reason to believe AAE speaking children are deficient in their ability to learn a rich and functional vocabulary. Existing vocabulary tests can be culturally biased because lexical items are selected and normed on the middle class. This results in an inherent bias against linguistically and culturally diverse populations. Some African American children have less exposure to lexical items selected on standardized tests than middle-class children. These cultural and language differences become exacerbated when these children enter school. Frequently AAE speaking children are referred to school speech-language pathologists (SLP) for language testing. However, the SLP is often ill-equipped to provide an unbiased evaluation due to reasons previously mentioned. The problem for the SLP is to determine what areas of semantics to test and what methods should be utilized to test. In order to address this problem I propose to test the following hypotheses: (1) semantic knowledge in AAE speaking children can be assessed validly and in a non-biased way by determining how well they are able to use morphosyntactic cues to fix the meaning of new verbs; and (2) an effective way to assess this is through fast mapping.
