Children's marking of verbal -s by nonmainstream English dialect and clinical status.

Purpose: Children's marking of verbal -s was examined by their dialect (African American English [AAE] vs. Southern White English [SWE]) and clinical status (specific language impairment [SLI] vs. typically developing [TD]) and as a function of 4 linguistic variables (verb regularity, negation, expression of a habitual activity, and expression of historical present tense).

Empirically derived combinations of tools and clinical cutoffs: an illustrative case with a sample of culturally/linguistically diverse children.

Purpose: Using a sample of culturally/linguistically diverse children, we present data to illustrate the value of empirically derived combinations of tools and cutoffs for determining eligibility in child language impairment.

Method: Data were from 95 4- and 6-year-olds (40 African American, 55 White; 18 with language impairment, 77 without) who lived in the rural South; they involved primarily scores from the Comprehension subtest of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale-Fourth Edition (CSSB; R. Thorndike, E.

The clinical utility of nonword repetition for children living in the rural south of the US.

Nonword repetition (NWR) tasks have been shown to minimize cultural biases in language assessment. In the current study, we further examined the clinical utility of NWR with 83 children who lived in the rural south of the US; 33 were African American and 50 were White, with 16 classified as specifically language impaired (SLI) 6-year-olds and 67 classified as either age-matched or younger controls. Main effects were found for group, with the children in the SLI group earning lower NWR scores than the controls.