How African American English-Speaking First Graders Segment and Rhyme Words and Nonwords With Final Consonant Clusters.

Purpose: This study explored how typically developing 1st grade African American English (AAE) speakers differ from mainstream American English (MAE) speakers in the completion of 2 common phonological awareness tasks (rhyming and phoneme segmentation) when the stimulus items were consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant (CVCC) words and nonwords.

Method: Forty-nine 1st graders met criteria for 2 dialect groups: AAE and MAE. Three conditions were tested in each rhyme and segmentation task: Real Words No Model, Real Words With a Model, and Nonwords With a Model.

Metalinguistics, stress accuracy, and word reading: does dialect matter?

Purpose: The authors examined the influence of demographic variables on nonmainstream American English (NMAE) use; the differences between NMAE speakers and mainstream American English (MAE) speakers on measures of metalinguistics, single-word reading, and a new measure of morphophonology; and the differences between the 2 groups in the relationships among the measures.

Method: Participants were typically developing 3rd graders from Memphis, TN, including 21 MAE and 21 NMAE speakers. Children received a battery of tests measuring phonological and morphological awareness (PA and MA), morphophonology (i.

Third graders' metalinguistic skills, reading skills, and stress production in derived English words.

Purpose: This study examined relationships between 3rd graders' metalinguistic skills (phonological and morphological awareness), reading skills (decoding and word identification), and accurate stress production in derived words with stress-changing suffixes.

Method: Seventy-six typically developing 3rd-grade children (M=8;8[years;months]) participated in a battery of tests measuring general oral language ability, phonological and morphological awareness skills, reading skills, and derived word production.

Results: Significant positive correlations between stress accuracy in derived words and all other measures were found.

Exploration of lexical-semantic factors affecting stress production in derived words.

Purpose: This study examined whether lexical frequency, semantic knowledge, or sentence context affect children's production of primary stress in derived words with stress-changing suffixes (e.g., -ity).