Dialect differences in statement verification among children.

Abstract

Two verification tasks were designed, one in SE, Task 1 (e.g., You aren't a baby) and the other in BE, Task 2 (e.g., You ain't no baby). All subjects received both tasks. The two tasks consisted of true affirmative, false affirmative, true negative and false negative statements. All tasks were presented orally. The children were instructed to say "right" or "wrong" in response to each statement. Only verbal responses were scored.

The sample consisted of 48 BE speakers and 48 SE speakers, ages 5-10.

An analysis of variance was performed on the number of errors for the four types of statements in each task. The most important aspect of these results was that the SE task was more difficult than the BE task. SE true negatives were more difficult for children to verify than BE true negative statements, but true and false affirmatives in SE and BE were equally difficult.

These results are discussed in terms of how specific aspects of a language affect the way in which children understand sentences.

This study addresses the issue of how the rule of negative concord in Black English (multiple negation, e.g., You ain't no baby, which is equivalent to the Standard English statement You aren't a baby) would affect the verification process. BE sentences with negative concord have more negatives in their sentence structure than SE negative sentences and BE negatives can appear in a variety of locations within a sentence. Thus, I hypothesize that a BE sentence with negative concord should be more salient to a listener than a SE sentence with a single negative. BE negative statements should be retained more easily than SE negative statements. Given two tasks, one in BE and the other in SE, children should perform better on negatives in the BE task than on negatives in the SE task, but equally well on affirmatives. Younger children should benefit more from negatives in the BE task than older children.