Caregiver-Child Interactions: Utilizing an Ecobehavioral Model to Investigate the Effect of Activity Contexts on African American English Use.
Karina Saechao, Meghan Matuszeski, Yo Jackson and 1 others
PMID 41812676WHAT IT FOUND
Caregivers used less African American English when reading books compared to free play, but children's use remained consistent.
Children were more likely to use the dialect after a caregiver did, but not vice versa. This suggests reading cues suppress dialect use in adults, not children.
Key findings
01Caregivers were 2.21 times less likely to use African American English features during book reading than during free play, while children showed no significant difference between the two contexts.
02When a child used an African American English feature, the caregiver was significantly more likely to use one in their next utterance, but a caregiver's use did not increase the likelihood of the child using one.
03Higher maternal education was associated with a lower likelihood of utterances containing African American English features, with a predicted probability drop from 9.10% to 3.39% across education levels.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample was drawn from a study on adversity and was primarily low-income, which may limit generalizability to other socioeconomic groups. Participants' language skills were not comprehensively assessed, so undiagnosed speech or language disorders cannot be ruled out. The study only analyzed morphosyntactic features, not phonological features of AAE. The analysis was cross-sectional at one timepoint (age 5), so it cannot determine how these patterns change as children enter school.
Declared interests
None declared.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the caregivers' reduced AAE use during book reading as a lack of competence or willingness to use the dialect. The study suggests this shift is influenced by the explicit cues of written text (which is in Mainstream American English) and potentially prior educational experiences, while children's use remained consistent. Do not assume that modeling AAE by the caregiver will immediately increase the child's use in the next utterance, as the study found this direction of influence was not significant.