Difference Versus Deficit in Child African American English

We propose that shared features (noncontrastive) between African American English (AAE) and Standard American English (SAE) may be more diagnostically salient than features not shared (contrastive) when identifying children of AAE language backgrounds with language disorders. The syntax of child speakers of AAE with language disorders (LD) and child speakers of AAE without language disorders (NLD) were compared. Syntactic features were transcribed from conversational language samples of seven LD and seven NLD children, and these features were classified according to their overlapping relationship with SAE. Shared features between AAE and SAE were designated as "noncontrastive" and features not shared as "contrastive". The production of several noncontrastive linguistic features were significantly different between groups, whereas group differences were nonsignificant for all contrastive features, with the exception of the past tense /ed/ morpheme.