Grammaticality Judgments of Tense and Agreement by Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder Across Dialects of English.
Janna B Oetting, Janet L McDonald, Lori E Vaughn
PMID 37889217WHAT IT FOUND
Children with DLD judged grammar poorly across both Southern White English and African American English, regardless of dialect.
Typical speakers showed dialect-specific patterns, especially for verbal -s. Do not assume a child's production of a form predicts how they judge it, particularly in DLD.
Key findings
01Children with DLD in both SWE and AAE groups struggled to judge grammaticality, with their judgments not differing significantly by dialect, unlike the typical development groups.
02Typical speakers' judgments of verbal -s forms differed by dialect (SWE vs AAE) even though their production of these forms also differed, whereas children with DLD did not show this dialectal distinction in judgments.
03For children with DLD, there was little correlation between how they produced tense and agreement forms and how they judged them, unlike in typical speakers where these measures were related.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used the TEGI, a test designed for General American English, which lacked items to fully evaluate the specific grammatical repertoire of SWE and AAE. The grammaticality judgment task used a binary 'good/not so good' format, which may have imposed unnecessary processing demands and prevented gradient responses that could reveal more nuanced judgments. The sample was drawn from a specific rural southern community, which may limit generalizability to other regions or dialect variations. The study was cross-sectional, so it cannot describe how these judgment and production patterns change with age.
Declared interests
Funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (Grant RO1DC009811). No other conflicts of interest were declared.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use the TEGI's standard General American English norms to diagnose DLD in SWE or AAE speakers, as this will misclassify a large number of typically developing children as impaired. Also, do not assume that a child's production of a grammatical form accurately reflects their internal judgment of its correctness, particularly in children with DLD.