The diagnostic problem of how validly to assess the language of children who speak
dialects different from Mainstream American English (MAE) has challenged the field
of communication disorders for several decades. The key to its solution is to recognize
differences due to dialect or development and remove them from the initial diagnosis
of a disorder. A new approach to the puzzle, implemented jointly by University of
Massachusetts scholars and the Psychological Corporation (TPC), takes two directions:
(1) it provides new normative data on African American English (AAE) development,
and (2) it proposes a level of analysis deeper than dialect for the discovery of alternate
markers of a disorder. We present three objectives for a language assessment instrument
designed to solve this longstanding problem: (1) to answer the problem/no problem
question for a given child; (2) to provide explanatory data about the nature of the
problem; and (3) to achieve objectives 1 and 2 in a way that is culturally and linguistically
fair to both speakers of MAE and speakers of other dialects of English such as AAE.
Sources of language variation - Mainstream American English (MAE) - African American
English (AAE) - cultural and linguistic bias - contrastive and noncontrastive language
features - ASHA's position paper on social dialects
