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

Dialect differences between African American English (AAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE) impact how children comprehend sentences. However, research on real-time sentence processing has the potential to reveal the underlying causes of these differences. This study used eye tracking, which measures how children interpret linguistic features as a sentence unfolds, and examined how AAE- and MAE-speaking children processed "was" and "were," a morphology feature produced differently in MAE and AAE. Fifty-nine participants, ages 7;8 to 11;0 years, completed standardized measures of dialect density and receptive vocabulary. In the eye tracking task, participants heard sentences in MAE with either unambiguous (e.g., "Jeremiah") or ambiguous (e.g., "Carolyn May"), subjects and eye movements were measured to singular (image of one person) or plural referents (image of two people). After the onset of the auxiliary verb, AAE-speaking children were sensitive to "was" and "were" when processing sentences but were less likely than MAE-speaking children to use "was" as a basis for updating initial predictions of plural referents. Among African American children, dialect density was predictive of sensitivity to "was" when processing sentences. Results suggest that linguistic mismatch impacts how contrastive verb morphology is used to update initial interpretations of MAE sentences.