Identifier

etd-01052016-164703

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Communication Sciences and Disorders

Document Type

Dissertation

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine Cajun English (CE)-speaking children’s marking of infinitival TO. To do this, CE-speaking children’s marking of infinitival TO was compared to the marking of infinitival TO by Southern White English (SWE)- and African American English (AAE)-speaking children. Marking of infinitival TO also was examined as a function of the children’s clinical status (i.e., Specific Language Impairment, SLI, or typically developing, TD) and by the verb contexts that preceded the infinitival TO forms.

The data came from 180 kindergarteners who lived in four rural towns in Assumption Parish, Louisiana. The children’s dialect classifications were based on their school location, which led to 37 children classified speakers of CE, 68 classified as speakers of SWE, and 75 classified as speakers of AAE. The children’s clinical status was based on a review of each child’s academic profile and test scores, which led to 54 children classified as SLI and 126 classified as TD. The data were 4,530 infinitival TO contexts that were extracted from play-based, examiner-child, language samples. Within the samples, the children’s infinitival TO contexts were coded as zero marked (e.g., went Ø go) or overtly marked (e.g., went to go), and the preceding verb contexts were classified as GO, COME, WENT, or all OTHER verbs (e.g., want, like, have).

Results indicated that the children’s overall marking of infinitival TO did not differ as a function of their dialects. However, the preceding verb context influenced the CE-speaking children’s rates of zero marking in ways that differed from what was found for the SWE- and AAE-speaking children. Also, for each dialect, the children’s overall rates of zero marked infinitival TO were higher for the SLI group than for the TD controls, and this finding was directly tied to differences in the children’s zero marking of infinitival TO when it was preceded by a verb classified as OTHER. Together, these findings show subtle differences in the use of grammar by children who speak different nonmainstream dialects of English while also further documenting the grammatical weaknesses of children with SLI within these dialects.

Date

2015

Document Availability at the Time of Submission

Release the entire work immediately for access worldwide.

Committee Chair

Oetting, Janna

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_dissertations.2413

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