Comprehension of Third Person Singular /s/ in AAE-Speaking Children                

Comprehension of Third Person Singular /s/ in AAE-Speaking Children

        Over the past years, studies and research on African American English (AAE) have generated a great deal of information on its phonological and morphosyntactic characteristics, which has been a great contributor in the legitimization of this English dialect as a full linguistic system. Further research on AAE development has led to the identification of alternative assessment procedures which distinguish language disorders and language difference. Additionally, studies have also focused more on the production of AAE features such as vernacular morphosyntactic forms, their occurrence and complex sentence production in African American children. However, despite these informative studies on AAE, there has been very little research and education in language comprehension in AAE-speaking children. The focus of this paper is on the understanding of the third person singular /s/ in African American English-speaking children.

The few studies on the comprehension of the third person singular /s/ in AAE-speaking children have highlighted on comprehension tasks such as active and passive sentence construction, responses to requests for information, morphological status features in comprehension and the children’s command of unique AAE properties such as constant be or negative concord.  These few research studies are indicative of a propensity of relative neglect of the comprehension of American English dialect and language literature. The advantage of gathering information on the understanding of a language can lead to the revelation of hidden meanings of a child’s production, underlying rules or knowledge of the AAE language structure (Johnson, 2015).

The /s/ on verbs in Mainstream American English (MAE) with third-person singular subjects, e.g. “he walks,” also referred to as the number concord marker, verbal agreement or sometimes the marker of the present tense is also present in AAE. In AAE, the third person /s/ is notably absent from the past tense of the copula, which is used as a “marker” of AAE. The omission of the third person singular /s/ in AAE speakers has been considered to be as high as 85%, which may have an impact on AAE’s underlying grammar. There has been no definitive explanation of how and why African Americans rarely use or omit third person /s/ in their language literature. However, researchers have tried making possible assumptions on the comprehension of third person /s/ which still are definitive.

The article on comprehension of the third person singular /s/ in AAE-speaking children (Johnson, 2005) tries to provide possible assumptions on how African American children comprehend the use third person /s/ as an indicator of the subject matter. Neither the adherence to phonological constraints nor the notion that African American children have both MAE and AAE grammar comprehensions failed to determine if the children understood the use of third-person singular /s/. The possible unexplored explanation that the study was unable to cover is the existence of an underlying rule for third person /s/ in AAE that is different in MAE. There is a possibility that children are sensitive to various aspects of the information conveyed by /s/. Impressions from adults have indicated that third person /s/ may serve as a mark of habitually or mark the narrative present, using a present form tense to refer something in the past, e.g. “He hits the lottery and goes crazy with joy.”

Concerning clinical implications, the existence of ambiguity between morphosyntactic characteristics of specific language impairment (SLI) and morphosyntactic features of typically developing African American English-speaking can influence speech-language therapy leading to misdiagnosis of language impairment among AAE-speaking children. Therefore, due to the lack of definitive evidence, the third person /s/should not be used as a salient marker for the identification of SLI. However, caregiver education should focus on nonconstructive characteristics of AAE and MAE, which lowers the misdiagnosis of language impairment in developing AAE-speaking children.

Reference

Johnson E. Valerie. (2015). Comprehension of Third Person Singular /s/ in AEE-Speaking Children. Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools. Vol 36 pp 116-124