Understanding How Dialect Differences Shape How AAE-Speaking Children Process Sentences in Real-Time

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Sociolinguistics

Background:

• Dialectal variations in language, specifically between African American English (AAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE), influence sentence comprehension in children.
• Real-time sentence processing research offers insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying these dialectal differences.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how children speaking AAE and MAE process specific grammatical features, focusing on the auxiliary verbs "was" and "were."
• To examine the real-time interpretation of verb morphology by comparing eye-tracking data between AAE- and MAE-speaking children.

Main Methods:

• Utilized eye tracking to monitor children's moment-to-moment interpretation of sentences as they unfolded.
• Assessed 59 children (ages 7–11) using dialect density and receptive vocabulary measures.
• Presented sentences in MAE with singular or ambiguous subjects and measured eye movements toward singular or plural referents.

Main Results:

• AAE-speaking children demonstrated sensitivity to "was" and "were" during sentence processing.
• Compared to MAE speakers, AAE speakers were less likely to use "was" to adjust predictions for plural referents.
• Higher dialect density in African American children correlated with greater sensitivity to "was" during sentence processing.

Conclusions:

• Linguistic differences between AAE and MAE affect how children update their interpretations of sentences in real-time.
• The study highlights the impact of linguistic mismatch on the processing of contrastive verb morphology.