Specific Language Impairment in African American English and Southern White English: Measures of Tense and Agreement With Dialect-Informed Probes and Strategic Scoring.
Janna B Oetting, Jessica R Berry, Kyomi D Gregory and 2 others
PMID 31525131WHAT IT FOUND
Dialect-informed probes identified language impairment in African American and Southern White English-speaking kindergartners.
Strategic scoring worked best. Accuracy never exceeded 90%, so these probes should profile strengths and guide goals, but never diagnose alone.
Key findings
01Strategic scoring of tense and agreement probes showed a larger difference between children with and without language impairment than modified scoring, and produced more balanced sensitivity and specificity than unmodified or modified approaches.
02Classification accuracy for identifying language impairment varied by dialect, with lower accuracy for African American English speakers than Southern White English speakers, and never reaching the 90% standard considered sufficient for diagnosis.
03The probes elicited high numbers of tense and agreement forms quickly, making them useful for describing a child's language profile and monitoring progress, even if they are not sufficient for diagnosis.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Study included only kindergartners in one rural community, so results may not generalize to older children or other regions. Classification accuracy for AAE speakers was significantly lower than for SWE speakers. The 'strategic' scoring approach is new and may need refinement for other grammatical structures.
Declared interests
Funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIH). No commercial conflicts reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lower marking rates in African American English speakers as evidence of a more severe impairment. The study found that dialect differences persisted even with strategic scoring, and accuracy was lower for AAE speakers, meaning the probes are less reliable for this group.