An investigation of non-standard english syntax in 12-year old coloured children

Abstract

Non-standard English (NSE) syntactic constructions occurring in the natural speech, behaviour of a group of 20 12-year old Coloured children were identified  and analysed. Three syntactic classes were isolated as having contained NSE constructions used significantly  by the group: auxiliary/copula verb forms, number-verb agreement and tense. A bi-dialectal sentence repetition task was then adminstered to the same group and to a matched group of White children, in which the two groups were compared on their ability to reproduce sentences containing (1) NSE constructions used significantly by the Coloured group, and (2) the standard English (SE) forms of these constructions. Results indicated that while Coloured Ss were able to reproduce many of the SE constructions, their overall performance  on these items was significantly inferior  to that of  White Ss. Conversely, their repetition of  NSE items was significantly  superior to that of  White Ss. The implications of these findings for the clinical language assessment of Coloured children were discussed.