The primary purpose of this study is to examine the influence of African American Vernacular English on the early invented spellings of kindergarten and first grade African American children. This study hypothesiz that a correlation exists between the number of unconventional early invented spellings and the percentage of phonological dialect feature usage. The relationship between the types of unconventional spellings of these young speakers of AAVE and the features of their dialect will also be examined. The long term objective of this study is to provide data for the development o culturally sensitive educational materials which link the spoken/underlying representational skills of the African America Vernacular English speaker to their written representations. This application also plans to provide developmental data relative to the spelling skills of nonstandard dialect speakers.
