Examining the use of standard language production measures in the language samples of African-American toddlers

Abstract

This study examined the relationship between several measures of language production, age, and non-standard speech use in toddlers from African-American English (AAE) backgrounds. Free play language samples were collected from two age groups of typically developing African-American toddlers. Group one consisted of 11 toddlers who were 2½ years old and group two consisted of 11 toddlers who were 3½ years old. Measures of mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLU), mean syntactic length, Index of Productive Syntax scores, and a dialect density rate were extracted from the language samples. Results indicated that MLU, MSL, and IPSYN scores were sensitive to differences in chronological age for the toddlers. These findings suggest that measures other than MLU, such as the IPSYN, may prove to be useful and valid tools for monitoring the language growth of young speakers from AAE backgrounds.