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Purpose: This study explored how typically developing 1st grade African American English (AAE) speakers differ from mainstream American English (MAE) speakers in the completion of 2 common phonological awareness tasks (rhyming and phoneme segmentation) when the stimulus items were consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant (CVCC) words and nonwords.
Method: Forty-nine 1st graders met criteria for 2 dialect groups: AAE and MAE. Three conditions were tested in each rhyme and segmentation task: Real Words No Model, Real Words With a Model, and Nonwords With a Model.
Results: The AAE group had significantly more responses that rhymed CVCC words with consonant-vowelconsonant words and segmented CVCC words as consonant-vowel-consonant than the MAE group across all experimental conditions. In the rhyming task, the presence of a model in the real word condition elicited more reduced final cluster responses for both groups. In the segmentation task, the MAE group was at ceiling, so only the AAE group changed across the different stimulus presentations and reduced the final cluster less often when given a model.
Conclusion: Rhyming and phoneme segmentation performance can be influenced by a child's dialect when CVCC words are used.
Novice readers and writers whose languages have a phonetically based written form greatly depend on their awareness of the sounds in their spoken language (i.e., phonology) as they map sounds onto print (Hogan, Catts, & Little, 2005; Terry, 2006). In English, no individuals consistently speak according to the way words are spelled; however, some speakers may use a dialect of English that differs from spelling patterns more than others (Wolfram & Schilling-Estes, 2006). For children who speak African American English (AAE), there are more occurrences where spelling does not match pronunciation compared with other, more mainstream varieties of English (Charity, Scarborough, & Griffin, 2004). AAE is spoken primarily, but not exclusively, by some African Americans in the United States, and it contains speech patterns developed from the unique history of modern-day African Americans (Rickford & Rickford, 2000). AAE is a rule-governed, valid language variety that adequately and uniquely expresses the collective experiences of its speakers, yet most of the morphosyntactic and phonological patterns of AAE contrasting from mainstream American English (MAE) patterns are rarely found in the language of textbooks and other instructional print materials used in mainstream American classrooms (Rickford...