Neighborhood effects on use of African-American Vernacular English.
نویسندگان
چکیده
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is systematic, rooted in history, and important as an identity marker and expressive resource for its speakers. In these respects, it resembles other vernacular or nonstandard varieties, like Cockney or Appalachian English. But like them, AAVE can trigger discrimination in the workplace, housing market, and schools. Understanding what shapes the relative use of AAVE vs. Standard American English (SAE) is important for policy and scientific reasons. This work presents, to our knowledge, the first experimental estimates of the effects of moving into lower-poverty neighborhoods on AAVE use. We use data on non-Hispanic African-American youth (n = 629) from a large-scale, randomized residential mobility experiment called Moving to Opportunity (MTO), which enrolled a sample of mostly minority families originally living in distressed public housing. Audio recordings of the youth were transcribed and coded for the use of five grammatical and five phonological AAVE features to construct a measure of the proportion of possible instances, or tokens, in which speakers use AAVE rather than SAE speech features. Random assignment to receive a housing voucher to move into a lower-poverty area (the intention-to-treat effect) led youth to live in neighborhoods (census tracts) with an 11 percentage point lower poverty rate on average over the next 10-15 y and reduced the share of AAVE tokens by ∼3 percentage points compared with the MTO control group youth. The MTO effect on AAVE use equals approximately half of the difference in AAVE frequency observed between youth whose parents have a high school diploma and those whose parents do not.
منابع مشابه
Language Deficits or Differences: What We Know about African American Vernacular English in the 21st Century
This focus of this paper is to present an overview of the current research which examines the language and literacy performance of African American children who speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE), as presented from a deficit versus difference perspective. Language and literacy and assessment and remediation of AAVE speakers are discussed in sections one and two. Section three of t...
متن کاملPHONOLOGICAL FEATURES OF AFRICAN AMERICAN VERNACULAR ENGLISH IN CHILD-DIRECTED VERSUS ADULT-DIRECTED SPEECH A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Science
One of the most timeless and universal activities, in which human beings across cultures participate, is speaking to children. This study investigated the differences between child-directed speech (CDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS) on measures of mean length of utterance (MLU), number of utterances, number of different words (NDW), and total number of words (TNW). In addition to examining th...
متن کاملAntagonistic Contact and Inverse Affiliation: Appropriation of /TH/-fronting by White Speakers in South Philadelphia
This paper examines a group of white speakers in South Philadelphia who exhibit appropriation of African American Vernacular English /TH/-fronting. Speakers with the most antagonistic contact and most aggressive attitudes toward their African American neighbors show the highest rates of /TH/-fronting. This paper argues that appropriation of the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) ethnole...
متن کاملSpelling and dialect: comparisons between speakers of African American vernacular English and White speakers.
One characteristic of African American vernacular English (AAVE) is final obstruent devoicing, where the final consonant of a word like rigid is pronounced more like /t/ than /d/. To determine whether this dialect characteristic influences adults' spelling, African American and White college students spelled words such as rigid and ballot, pronounced by either a speaker of their own dialect or ...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
دوره 112 38 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2015