Why study child language disorders in the context of dialect diversity?
Historically, children who speak different dialects of English have been excluded from studies of SLI. Similarly, researchers who study English dialect variation routinely exclude speakers who are not considered typically developing. This has led to two very different types of researchers (psycholinguists & sociolinguists) studying language without talking to each other and without learning from each other’s work. In our lab, we combine these two areas of study to learn more about how childhood language impairment (SLI) manifests in different dialects of English. Two findings repeatedly emerge from our studies:
- Nonstandard dialects of English are structurally different from the grammatical impairment of children with SLI.
- Within all dialects, children with SLI present grammar difficulties that distinguish them from their typically developing peers. To illustrate this finding, the figure below was constructed with data from our lab. The language pattern examined was overt marking of regular past tense (e.g., jumped) and the dialects were Southern African American English (SAAE) and Southern White English (SWE).
