Specific Language Impairment in African American English and Southern White English: Measures of Tense and Agreement With Dialect-Informed Probes and Strategic Scoring

What is it about?

Speech-language pathologists make decisions about what aspects of language to target within child language assessment and treatment and how to code and score a child's language data when the child presents with a language impairment and speaks a nonmainstream English dialect, such as African American English (AAE) or Southern White English (SWE). Our results show that English tense and agreement structures should be targeted when a child presents with language impairment in AAE or SWE as long as dialect-informed probes, strategic scoring, and dialect-specific cut scores are utilized and these data are combined with other types of language data.

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