Department

PhD in Communication Disorders

Document Type

Dissertation

Abstract

The Tense Marker Total (TMT) and the Tense and Agreement Productivity (TAP) score are two ways of measuring children’s tense and agreement systems, and studies have shown that both measures track developmental growth across different ages in General American English (GAE)-speaking children. This dissertation examined the feasibility and validity of using these measures for children learning African American English (AAE).

The data were cross-sectional archival language samples from 38 AAE-speaking children who ranged in age from three to five years (11 at 3 years, 12 at 4 years, 15 at 5 years). The language samples were coded and scored for TMT and TAP using GAE-based protocols from the original authors of these measures.

Results showed that the samples contained a sufficient number of obligatory contexts for calculating the two measures for all five morphemes for all the age groups except contexts for past tense -ed for the three-year olds. The AAE-speaking children earned TMT and TAP scores that were lower than scores reported for same age GAE-speaking children but they increased across ages similar to scores reported in the literature for GAE child speakers. Also, among the participants, copula BE emerged before the other structures, which was also similar to some previous studies of GAE-speaking children. The TMT and TAP had age effects between the 3- and 4-year-olds and 3- and 5-year-olds but no age effects between 4- and 5-year-olds after language sample length was controlled.

Finally, statistical analysis showed no association between the children’s Dialect-specific Form (DSF) Densities and their TMT and TAP scores. However, DSF Density was significantly higher in the 5-year-olds compared to both the 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds, which is unlike some previous studies of older children that show DSF Densities to decrease with age.

The findings support the use of TMT and TAP for measuring tense and agreement (T/A) in AAE. This supports the Disorder within Dialects framework that encourages the inclusion of T/A forms in assessment of children who speak non-GAE dialects of English such as AAE. However, the TMT and TAP scores for many participants in the current study showed typically developing (TD) cutoff scores lower than reported for same age GAE-speaking children reported in the literature. This indicates that the TMT and TAP measures as developed by GAE should not be considered as culturally appropriate for AAE-speaking children.

Date

8-21-2025

Committee Chair

Janna Oetting

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