Narrative Discourse of African American Children

Abstract

Abstract Oral narratives are increasingly used in speech and language evaluations for measuring language skills, and to measure children's organizational skill within a broader communicative context. Because of this, oral-narrative analyses are applied to diverse age ranges and populations. However, there are few studies examining the production of narratives of child speakers of African American English (AAE), and these previous studies offer conflicting views on the nature of narratives in this population. Because of this, the purpose of this study was to investigate the production of narratives of AAE speaking children using elicitation procedures that were standard across participants. Fifteen partici-pants were selected from a predominantly African American low-income com-munity of Springfield, Massachusetts. Highpoint and story-grammar analyses-two analyses that are often applied narratives in previous studies- were applied to the samples gathered from these participants. The results indicated that (a) subjects produced a greater number of more advanced (com-plete and complex) structures than lower level structures within story grammar analysis at all age levels, and (b) the most advanced structure (classic structure) was observed more often than any other structures within highpoint analysis. (Speech/Hearing/Language Pathology)