Children's comprehension of standard and Black English sentences. Frentz, T. S. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Wisconsin Madison, Madison, WI, 1970.
Children's comprehension of standard and Black English sentences [link]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
Recent research has found that user performance varied as a function of dialect in a sentence production-type task. The present tense, singular-plural grammatical distinction marked by inflection was the distinction considered in the present study. A group of 30 white and 30 black, third-grade children were presented an array of 32 sentence-picture combinations. The sentences varied between standard and black English and between singular and plural, while the pictures varied between singular and plural. The Ss saw a picture projected on a screen and then heard a sentence through earphones. A S's task was to press either a "means same" or a "means different" button depending upon whether the sentence and picture had similar or different grammatical markings. Results included: (1) No significant race by dialect interaction was found; (2) Combined S performance with black English sentences did not differ significantly from such performance with standard English sentences; (3) White children performed significantly better than black children in terms of the correctness of response measure only in singular sentence conditions; (4) Plural sentence/plural picture combinations required shorter response latencies than any other sentence-picture combinations.
@phdthesis{frentz_childrens_1970,
	address = {Madison, WI},
	type = {Ph.{D}. {Dissertation}},
	title = {Children's comprehension of standard and {Black} {English} sentences},
	url = {https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED056050},
	abstract = {Recent research has found that user performance varied as a function of dialect in a sentence production-type task. The present tense, singular-plural grammatical distinction marked by inflection was the distinction considered in the present study. A group of 30 white and 30 black, third-grade children were presented an array of 32 sentence-picture combinations. The sentences varied between standard and black English and between singular and plural, while the pictures varied between singular and plural. The Ss saw a picture projected on a screen and then heard a sentence through earphones. A S's task was to press either a "means same" or a "means different" button depending upon whether the sentence and picture had similar or different grammatical markings. Results included: (1) No significant race by dialect interaction was found; (2) Combined S performance with black English sentences did not differ significantly from such performance with standard English sentences; (3) White children performed significantly better than black children in terms of the correctness of response measure only in singular sentence conditions; (4) Plural sentence/plural picture combinations required shorter response latencies than any other sentence-picture combinations.},
	school = {University of Wisconsin Madison},
	author = {Frentz, Thomas Stanley},
	year = {1970},
}

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