Morphological Intervention with African American English Speaking Children: Verbal s

1
Morphological Intervention with African American
English Speaking Children Verbal s Frances
Burns, Texas State University-San Marcos, Stephen
M. Camarata, Vanderbilt University This research
was supported in part by NIH grant DC005994

• Introduction
• There is a paucity of empirical research
  regarding morpho-syntactic intervention with
  young African American English (AAE) speakers who
  have specific language impairment (SLI).
• The lack of research may be due to the persistent
  difficulty in the valid description of language
  impairment in young AAE speakers.
• Purpose
• To examine the function of verbal s in child AAE
  in order to determine if 3rd person singular s
  is an appropriate intervention target.
• Research Question
• Do young AAE speakers use verbal s to mark 3rd
  person singular or habituality?
• Method
• 4 African American males ages 36-49 with SLI
  were disaggregated from a larger NIH study (5R01
  DC005994-2) to investigate whether children with
  SLI benefit from intervention using grammatical
  morphemes that mark tense and agreement
  (auxiliary is/are/was), and whether treatment
  gains influence use of other untreated morphemes.
  
• A probe task was used to assess the participants
  interpretation of verbal s at 4 treatment
  phases.

• Results
• Participants 1-3 interpreted verbal s as a
  habituality marker at pre-treatment and then as
  3rd person singular marker as treatment
  progressed.
• Participant 4 (P4) never interpreted verbal s as
  a marker of habituality. P4 demonstrated more
  severely impaired language skills than
  participants 1-3.
• Conclusion
• Verbal s may not function as a 3rd person
  singular marker in child AAE.
• Intervention targeting 3rd person singular s may
  not be appropriate.
• Discussion
• An important question that remains is whether
  P4s lack of habituality interpretation is a
  function of General American English (GAE), and
  the dialect was misjudged as AAE due to key
  features that are overtly marked in GAE but not
  in AAE. If so, habituality marking may help
  distinguish those children developing AAE
  typically from those whose language is impaired.
• Reference Leonard, L.B., Camarata, S.M.,
  Pawlowska, M., Brown, B., Camarata, M.N.
  (2006). Tense and agreement morphemes in speech
  of children with specific language impairment
  during intervention Phase 2. Journal of Speech,
  Language, and Hearing Research, 49, 749-770.