Comprehension of complex syntactic structures in Southern varieties of American English and mainstream American English

Abstract

Research on the acquisition of complex syntactic structures in Southern English (SE) and Southern African-American English (SAAE) is near-absent, though an extensive body of literature is available on phenomena such as those of auxiliary and copula BE, and 3SG -(e)s. de Villiers et al. (2011) supported that characteristics found in AAE help avoid commonly observed developmental errors in the comprehension of wh-questions. Prior work on mainstream American English (MAE) has shown that where and what are acquired before who, how, why, which, and when. Research on passive voice revealed that children comprehend action verb passives earlier than non-action verb passives. We investigate the comprehen­sion of wh-questions and passive voice in 222 SAAE-, SE- and MAE-speaking children, aged 2-13 and examine whether there were certain structural environments where we examined the comprehension of wh-questions or passive voice that were more challenging for the three groups. The results show that SE and SAAE have comparable development with wh-questions and passive voice, with minor exceptions. They confirm findings from previous studies on both the order of acquisition of wh-questions and the earlier acquisition of action passives, as well as the SAAE-speaking participants’ highly accurate performance with wh-questions, especially structures which include indirect/medial questions.