Comprehension of Standard English at varied speaking rates by children whose major dialect is Black English

Comprehension of spoken Standard English was measured via a picture selection task for 80 Black English (BE) speaking and 80 Standard English (SE) speaking children at four age levels between 5 years, 6 months, and 9 years, 6 months. Test stimuli consisted of four syntactically matched groups of eight sentences divided into two levels of difficulty. The four groups of sentences were heard by all Ss at four different speaking rates from 4.9 (fast) through 2.5 (slow) syllables per second. Results showed that BE speaking children had greater difficulty comprehending spoken SE than the SE speaking control Ss. Significant age and difficulty effects were found for both groups; a significant rate effect was found for the BE speaking group only; and sentence difficulty was found to interact differently with age for the two groups.