Phonological Feature Article Review Essay

Article Review: Craig & Washington(2003)

1 Differences in phonology could potentially affect the ability to establish phoneme-grapheme links when learning to read. The phonological features of child African American English (AAE) speakers are different and therefore important to understand because reading acquisition could be affected. The National Assessment of Education Progress reported African American children had a greater prevalence of lower reading levels when compared to White students. An understanding of the specific phonological features of child AAE were investigated during this study to contribute to the minimal research that had been conducted in phonological awareness of child AAE speakers.

2 The participants for this study were 29 typically developing African-American boys and 35 girls. Each participant was a student living in Michigan from 2nd -5th grade. 19 of the students were from low socioeconomic status

The amount of AAE features in production increases with grade level however, the students in higher grades had more opportunities to produce features of AAE due to the increased number of words read by the child. DDM was used to control differences in amount of words read by each child. Phonological features and combination features were used more often than morphosyntactic features. Phonological features produced most frequently among participants included monophthongization of dipthongs, substitutions for voiced and voiceless “th” and consonant cluster reduction. Half of the morphosyntactic features were used by participants who spoke AAE. Most common morphosyntactic features included zero past tense, zero article, and indefinite article. Of the 41 phonological, morphosyntactic, and combination features, 60% were produced. These analyses indicated phonological types common for child AAE occurred more often than morphosyntactic