African American English dialect and performance on nonword spelling and phonemic awareness tasks.

Purpose: To evaluate the role of dialect on phonemic awareness and nonword spelling tasks. These tasks were selected for their reliance on phonological and orthographic processing, which may be influenced by dialect use.

Method: Eighty typically developing African American children in Grades 1 and 3 were first screened for dialect use and then completed a standardized test of phonological processing and a nonword spelling measure.

A Developmental Lexical Bias in the Interpretation of Discrepant Messages.

Children's interpretations of lexical and vocal cues to speaker affect, independently and in combination, were examined in four studies. In Experiments 1 and 2, 7- to 11 -year-olds'judgments of lexical and paralinguistic cues were evaluated. In Experiment 3, these cues were combined to produce consistent and discrepant messages.