African American English Research Articles

Elevating Students’ Oral and Written Language: Empowering African American Students Through Language

A consistent pattern emerges where African American students’ scores lag behind their counterparts on both national and state literacy assessments. One possible explanation is rooted in the fact that approximately 80% of African American students speak African American English, which differs from the General American English, the language expected to be used within educational settings. African American English encompasses distinct phonological and grammatical (morphosyntactic) features compared to General American English. This paper aims to delineate the differences between these two languages, review research on African American English, and explore the prevalence of bidialectal or multidialectal abilities among African American students. Additionally, it will address research indicating that many teachers and teacher educators lack awareness of African American English, leading to a deficit-oriented perspective that views African American English as a linguistic deficiency rather than a linguistic difference.

A transformer-based approach to Nigerian Pidgin text generation

AbstractThis paper describes the development of a transformer-based text generation model for Nigerian Pidgin also known as Naijá, a popular language in West Africa. Despite its wide use, Nigerian Pidgin remains under-resourced, particularly in areas related to text generation and natural language processing. These difficulties are primarily due to technological constraints rather than the language’s fundamental attributes. There is currently a demand for Nigerian Pidgin-specific solutions because it is used in everyday communication and has a unique linguistic blend. This paper aims to close this gap by exploring the application of state-of-the-art transformer technology to develop a text generation model for Nigerian Pidgin. This work uses the public Afriberta-corpus dataset to optimize the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT-2) model across a sizeable dataset. The performance evaluators, BLEU and Perplexity metrics provide a detailed breakdown of the model’s text quality and predictive accuracy. Despite the difficulties caused by a limited amount of training data, preliminary evaluations show that the model can generate coherent Nigerian Pidgin text. The performance evaluation yielded perplexity scores of 43.56 for variable target reference length and 43.26 for fixed text length. BLEU scores of 0.15 for fixed max length and 0.56 for variable reference target length. This highlights the quality of generated text and the significant improvement when the generated text length is aligned with the reference target. Our work was benchmarked against African American Vernacular (AAVE) revealing that BLEU scores for AAVE are significantly lower than those for Standard American English, with BLEU given as 0.26. Our Nigerian Pidgin model, with a BLEU score of 0.56, shows a better performance. However, both results suggest that both dialects are challenging for language models. Leveraging the pre-trained transformer-based language model and evaluation metrics, we showcase the model’s capacity for coherent Nigerian Pidgin text generation. For future research, the research work can serve as a good foundation for advancement and progress in the Nigerian Pidgin language generation and other low-resource languages.

Does a dialect-shifting curriculum help early readers who speak African American English? Results from a randomized controlled study

Does a dialect-shifting curriculum help early readers who speak African American English? Results from a randomized controlled study

African American English, racialized femininities, and Asian American identity in Ali Wong's Baby Cobra

AbstractWe analyze Asian American comedian Ali Wong's linguistic and embodied performance in her 2016 stand‐up special, Baby Cobra, through a genre‐specific lens to investigate how stand‐up comedy's performance conventions shape her comedic persona. We argue that Wong uses communicative forms indexically associated with Blackness to perform racialized and gendered figures of personhood, including the white “Karen,” “sassy Black woman,” and “Asian grandmother.” This performance allows Wong to challenge hegemonic whiteness and dominant racializations of Asian women but relies on signs potentially interpreted as reproducing anti‐Black ideologies. We situate Wong as an individual performer, “Asian American” as an ethnoracial category vis‐à‐vis Blackness, and the linguistic practices of Asian and Black American communities within racial capitalist histories that have shaped contemporary raciolinguistic ideologies. Rather than approach language varieties and racialized groups as necessarily distinct, we treat them as relational—as necessarily intimately and historically connected.

AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect

Hundreds of millions of people now interact with language models, with uses ranging from help with writing1,2 to informing hiring decisions3. However, these language models are known to perpetuate systematic racial prejudices, making their judgements biased in problematic ways about groups such as African Americans4–7. Although previous research has focused on overt racism in language models, social scientists have argued that racism with a more subtle character has developed over time, particularly in the United States after the civil rights movement8,9. It is unknown whether this covert racism manifests in language models. Here, we demonstrate that language models embody covert racism in the form of dialect prejudice, exhibiting raciolinguistic stereotypes about speakers of African American English (AAE) that are more negative than any human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded. By contrast, the language models’ overt stereotypes about African Americans are more positive. Dialect prejudice has the potential for harmful consequences: language models are more likely to suggest that speakers of AAE be assigned less-prestigious jobs, be convicted of crimes and be sentenced to death. Finally, we show that current practices of alleviating racial bias in language models, such as human preference alignment, exacerbate the discrepancy between covert and overt stereotypes, by superficially obscuring the racism that language models maintain on a deeper level. Our findings have far-reaching implications for the fair and safe use of language technology.

Sociophonetic Properties of Southern California English among Black and Latinx Teens

Descriptions of ethnolects in the U.S. have frequently focused on canonical, well-described features of these varieties, but less work has focused on how such features may overlap and spread into other ethnolects and local varieties in contact. Outside the U.S., the concept of the multiethnolect has been used to describe such situations of dialect contact, but little work has been done to document highly multiethnic dialect contact situations in the U.S. This study is among the first to provide a sociophonetic description of the distribution of features linked to different ethnolects, and to describe a situation of sustained U.S. contact dialect among youth from different racialized groups. Analysis of the speech of a group of Black and Latinx adolescents in Southern California reveals that these teens use a variety of sociophonetic features that have been previously linked to Chicano English (ChE) and African American English (AAE), as well as California Anglo English (CAE). I examine eight phonological variables previously described in these other varieties and reveal a complex sociolinguistic situation in which teens of both ethnicities appear to employ repertoires that draw on features of ChE, AAE, and CAE. I argue that the patterns of use I observe in this data provide evidence of a unique type of dialect contact situation that reflects ongoing trends in urban centers across the U.S.

Verbal -s Variation in Earlier African American English

The origins of the variable - s-marking patterns of present-tense verbs in earlier African American English (AAE) have been widely argued, with one of the most common arguments stating that the pattern is indicative of the Northern Subjects Rule (NSR), a variable - s-marking rule common in the northern British Isles. I explored verbal - s in the Federal Writers’ Project ex-slave narratives to understand what patterns of - s-marking existed in earlier AAE and how these patterns differed across regions. Statistical analysis suggested no NSR influence in AAE as a whole or within any of the regions, but - s-marking still significantly differed between and within regions. I discuss other possible causes of this variation, including influence from other concord patterns, aspectual marking, and phonotactics, but highlight the difficulty of proposing concrete hypotheses due to change over time and a dearth of data.

Using language sample analyses across English dialects: A case-based approach for preschoolers

ABSTRACT This study compared language samples from typically developing 4-year-olds who spoke African American English (AAE), Jamaican English (JE), or Mainstream American English (MAE) to assess the value of using language sample analysis (LSA) measures for characterising language use across dialects of English. Specific LSA metrics included mean length of utterance (MLU) in morphemes and in words, the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn), Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) and measures of lexical diversity. Children demonstrated diverse linguistic patterns across dialects, but a Kruskal–Wallis H test did not reveal significant differences in scores obtained through LSA measures. Notably, the IPSyn captured morphosyntactic structures in each category across dialects where prior research has highlighted limitations. This preliminary study uses a case-based approach to illustrate the applicability of LSAs in describing linguistic variations across children who speak different dialects of English. Moreover, the findings from this study underscore the potential use of LSAs in describing linguistic patterns to support the characterisation of communication profiles for culturally and linguistically diverse children.

The representation of African American identity on screen for a Spanish audience

Existing studies of translations of audio-visual productions that explore African American issues focus exclusively on African American Vernacular English and culturally specific references, the standardisation or omission of which are seen to compromise the originals’ critique of race and their value for in-group identity. This article takes a multimodal approach to three such productions dubbed for a Spanish audience. Firstly, it examines how characters’ African American identity is rendered not only by language but also visually and aurally. Comprehension in dubbed versions is more likely to be affected by non-linguistic matters, such as casting of voice talent. Secondly, it is shown how translations shape the audio-visual creation of a fictional world and extra-diegetic elements that address a particular audience and thus enable in-group identification along ethnic lines. Lastly, an alternative translation strategy is outlined that targets audiences from the international Black diaspora to whom such productions might appeal.

Immigrants’ attitudes towards varieties of American English

Abstract Native speakers of English commonly perceive some social variants of their language to be more prestigious than others. It is less clear, however, whether nonnative English speakers from immigrant communities come to internalize similar language stereotypes. The present study analysed, through a language attitude survey, a total of 40 Korean American college students’ reactions to tape-recorded samples of five socially stratified varieties of English commonly heard in the U.S. Results indicated that Korean American college students perceived a Standard American English (SAE) typical of broadcast English in the U.S. most favourably. Nonstandard varieties (regional and ethnic dialects), especially African American English, were judged as less favourable. SAE and its speaker was associated with positive qualities on rating scales, while nonstandard guises were rated less favourably on the same characteristics. This study provides a greater understanding of how different English varieties are perceived by an immigrant community in the U.S. and invites future studies of English language attitudes in other minority communities.

The syntax of African American English borrowings in the Louisiana Creole tense-mood-aspect system

Abstract This paper presents the typologically unusual case of borrowed tense-mood-aspect morphemes. Data are taken from Louisiana Creole, a critically endangered French-lexifier creole. Over the course of its history, Louisiana Creole has been in contact with local varieties of both French and English, including African American English. It will be shown that points of structural congruity between Louisiana Creole and African American English have facilitated the borrowing of two aspect markers for speakers competent in both varieties. African American English stressed BIN has been borrowed and marks remote past habitual, stative, and completive. The adverb still has been borrowed and subsequently has grammaticalized as a continuative marker via spec-to-head reanalysis. These borrowings are integrated into the inflectional domain as functional heads marking aspect. Their ordering constraints are evaluated relative to a previous hierarchy proposed by Rottet. Discussion of contact-induced change in creole languages has typically been confined to examination of interactions with the lexifier, the language which contributes the majority of a creole’s vocabulary (in this case, French). Fewer studies have presented detailed accounts of how creoles behave when in contact with other languages, meaning that this particular contact context remains undertheorized.

The Growth of Complex Syntax in School-Age African American Children Who Speak African American English.

Syntax provides critical support for both academic success and linguistic growth, yet it has not been a focus of language research in school-age African American children. This study examines complex syntax performance of African American children in second through fifth grades. The current study explores the syntactic performances of African American children (N = 513) in Grades 2-5 on the Test of Language Development-Intermediate who speak African American English. Multilevel modeling was used to evaluate the growth and associated changes between dialect density and syntax. Analyzed data were compared both to the normative sample and within the recruited sample. The results suggest that dialect density exerted its impact early but did not continue to influence syntactic growth over time. Additionally, it was not until dialect density was accounted for in growth models that African American children's syntactic growth resembled normative expectations of a standardized language instrument. The current study suggests that failure to consider cultural language differences obscures our understanding of African American students' linguistic competence on standardized language assessments.

African American English: Perspectivas potencializadoras de identidades negras em aulas de língua Inglesa

This qualitative research, developed through a bibliographical study, aims at investigating African American English as an artifact to promote decolonial praxis of English language teaching, enhancing black identities. Put into practice, this means offering a theoretical and practical input so that black educators, who teach the English language, recognize how the target language may be taught and learned, valuing black identities, understanding and resisting the colonial ties which tend to make these bodies invisible throughout the process. Thus, the tensions among language, race and power and their influence on the emergence and resistance of African American English will be considered, focusing on some of its characteristics. From this, the pedagogical benefits which black epistemes can bring to English classes are taken as scope, considering their outcomes to promote a socioculturally significant teaching and learning process to black students, as well as the (de)construction and strengthening of diasporic black identities including the Brazilian context and its specificities underpinned by Amefrican perspective.

Dialect on Trial: An Experimental Examination of Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Character Judgments

The current study examines the effect of dialect for a Black speaker, paying particular attention to the implications for criminal justice processing. Participants in this study heard an audio clip of a Black man describing his weekend and were randomly assigned to hear the account spoken in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) or Mainstream American English (MAE). For half of each sample, the audio clip was described as an alibi. Participants then evaluated the speaker across dimensions related to character and criminality, as well as his race, education, and socio-economic status. Results indicate that the speaker was viewed as having worse character and a greater criminal propensity if he spoke using the AAVE guise rather than the MAE guise. Additionally, participants perceived the AAVE speaker to be more stereotypically Black, less educated, and lower socio-economic status. These findings raise questions about contemporary forms of bias in criminal justice processing.

Transcription Decisions of Conjoined Independent Clauses Are Equitable Across Dialects but Impact Measurement Outcomes.

Transcription of conjoined independent clauses within language samples varies across professionals. Some transcribe these clauses as two separate utterances, whereas others conjoin them within a single utterance. As an inquiry into equitable practice, we examined rates of conjoined independent clauses produced by children and the impact of separating these clauses within utterances on measures of mean length of utterance (MLU) by a child's English dialect, clinical status, and age. The data were archival and included 246 language samples from children classified by their dialect (African American English or Southern White English) and clinical status (developmental language disorder [DLD] or typically developing [TD]), with those in the TD group further classified by their age (4 years [TD4] or 6 years [TD6]). Rates of conjoined independent clauses and the impact of these clauses on MLU varied by clinical status (DLD < TD) and age (TD4 < TD6), but not by dialect. Correlations between the rate of conjoined clauses, MLU, and language test scores were also similar across the two dialects. Transcription decisions regarding conjoined independent clauses within language samples lead to equitable measurement outcomes across dialects of English. Nevertheless, transcribing conjoined independent clauses as two separate utterances reduces one's ability to detect syntactic differences between children with and without DLD and document syntactic growth as children age. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25822675.

Can listeners differentiate varieties using prosodic information? Lect identification in a persona-matching task

Sociolinguists and lay people have long been interested in the mechanisms by which dialect and speaker identification occur. The current study aims to test whether realizational differences found in production studies are salient factors in identification of different lects, as well as to examine differences between groups in identification. In this study, listeners were instructed to match clips containing H* and L+H* pitch accents with specific personae who represented speakers of five lects of interest (African American English, Jewish English, Appalachian English, Southern English, and Midwestern English). Listeners from different groups (Appalachian, African American, Jewish, and those who were not from any of these groups) were presented with both low-pass filtered and unfiltered versions of the clips. Results indicate that listeners performed at or above chance in the unfiltered condition. However, we did observe a consistent pattern such that listeners confused AAE and JE voices, as well as Appalachian and Southern voices, indicating that listeners may struggle to differentiate lects with similar historical development and/or prosodic patterns. Additionally, listeners showed sensitivity to the original lect in selecting a persona in the filtered condition, though they were less accurate overall compared to the unfiltered condition. Overall, listeners appear to be more sensitive to segmental phonological than prosodic information in lect identification. Additionally, when presented with a personae matching task, listeners from a variety of backgrounds perform with a high degree of accuracy, though examining patterns of confusion help to shed light on the variables that are most salient.&amp;nbsp;

An exploratory study on dialect density estimation for children and adult's African American Englisha).

This paper evaluates an innovative framework for spoken dialect density prediction on children's and adults' African American English. A speaker's dialect density is defined as the frequency with which dialect-specific language characteristics occur in their speech. Rather than treating the presence or absence of a target dialect in a user's speech as a binary decision, instead, a classifier is trained to predict the level of dialect density to provide a higher degree of specificity in downstream tasks. For this, self-supervised learning representations from HuBERT, handcrafted grammar-based features extracted from ASR transcripts, prosodic features, and other feature sets are experimented with as the input to an XGBoost classifier. Then, the classifier is trained to assign dialect density labels to short recorded utterances. High dialect density level classification accuracy is achieved for child and adult speech and demonstrated robust performance across age and regional varieties of dialect. Additionally, this work is used as a basis for analyzing which acoustic and grammatical cues affect machine perception of dialect.

African American English speakers' pitch variation and rate adjustments for imagined technological and human addressees.

This paper examines the adaptations African American English speakers make when imagining talking to a voice assistant, compared to a close friend/family member and to a stranger. Results show that speakers slowed their rate and produced less pitch variation in voice-assistant-"directed speech" (DS), relative to human-DS. These adjustments were not mediated by how often participants reported experiencing errors with automatic speech recognition. Overall, this paper addresses a limitation in the types of language varieties explored when examining technology-DS registers and contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of human-computer interaction.

Book Review: Inheritance and Innovation in the Evolution of Rural African American English

Book Review: Inheritance and Innovation in the Evolution of Rural African American English

Collaboration to Increase Cultural Relevance for African American English Speakers With Disabilities

Students with disabilities who are speakers of African American English (AAE) can face barriers and challenges in the classroom. There is the potential for negative perceptions of AAE and a lack of understanding of dialectal differences to impact student expectations and outcomes. School leadership must prepare educators to implement strategies to support students with these intersecting identities, yet research indicates that educators often need more preparation. Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are one special education discipline with specialized training and skills to meet student needs at the intersection of disability and linguistic diversity. Today, policymakers and school leaders call on educators to be CR practitioners. This article presents a CR framework and provides recommendations for educators collaborating with SLPs within the five framework themes. By leveraging partnerships with SLPs, educators can increase their cultural relevance and more effectively support educational outcomes for students with disabilities who are speakers of AAE.