Kids talk too: Linguistic justice and child African American English

Abstract

African American English (AAE) is a language form used primarily, though not exclusively by Black Americans of historical African descent. The language is rule governed, robust, and resistant to assimilation to the white American English (WAE) dialects that surround it. Although public schools in the United States have been putatively integrated since 1954, the 2020 census data reveals most children continue to live in segregated communities. White children live in communities that are on average 69% white and Black children in communities that are on average 55% Black. As children acquire the language forms of their community peers, we should expect most Black children will enter school using some AAE. Speech and language scientists can participate in linguistic justice by teaching the systematic nature of AAE speech most likely to perturb listeners and lead to misidentification of AAE speech variation as disorder. We will focus on weak syllable deletion and final consonant variation. We will show how to use AAE audio recordings and simple spectral analysis to decrease misinterpretation of typical AAE child speech as speech errors.