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Child African American English and Elaboration in Elicitation Tasks
Lisa Green
University of Texas, Austin
Research on African American English (AAE) has focused primarily on speech patterns of adults, adolescents, and school age children, so there is relatively little information on the language use of 3 to 5-year-old developing AAE-speaking children. This paper considers elaboration and clarification strategies used by 3 to 5-year-old developing AAE-speaking children to provide information and ask questions during elicitation tasks.
Data for this study are taken from elicitation tasks that were designed to determine whether 3 to 5-year-old developing AAE speakers comprehend aspectual be as a habitual tense-aspect marker and BIN as a remote past tense-aspect marker. Aspectual be indicates that an eventuality recurs (Green 2000, 2002), and remote past BIN situates an eventuality or some part of it in the far past (Labov 1972; Rickford 1973, 1975; Green 1998). The scenarios in aspectual be elicitation tasks portrayed characters as engaging in an activity on different occasions or the present, and they also portrayed characters/objects as being in some position or state on different occasions or the present. Some BIN scenarios portrayed characters/objects as having been in a state for a long time as compared to other characters/objects that had been in the state for a shorter time. Other BINscenarios portrayed characters as having been engaged in an activity longer than other characters. Participants answered questions about the stories, in which be and BIN preceded a verb, adjective, preposition, or noun.
Naturalistic or spontaneous data provide insight into production and comprehension of forms and constructions in child language. For instance, speech in natural conversation shows that some developing child AAE speakers begin to produce tense-aspect markers by age 4:
- L: You know a lot, don.t you?
J093: Yeah, cause I be watching it. (4;8 years) - L: Ooh, I like that jogging suit. Is that a new jogging suit? Hmm, or and old one?
J015: A new jacket?
L: You just got it? You just got it? Hmm?
J015: I BIN having it. (4 years)
Given the context of the conversation or narrative in which these sentences occurred, be and BIN are used as tense-aspect markers. In (1), be precedes a V-ing and indicates that J093.s watching it eventuality is a usual occurrence. BIN in J015.s last line (2) expresses that he has had the jacket for a long time.
While spontaneous data can be useful in providing information about production patterns in child speech, there are some limitations in relying on just that data source (Demuth 1996). One is that such data is not always clear about children.s comprehension and productive use of patterns. Elicitation tasks are useful in that they can be designed to answer specific questions that provide information about comprehension. In addition, they also allow participants to elaborate on their responses and give further information.
The type of data children provided in their elaboration and clarification strategies in the aspectual be and remote past BIN tasks showed that they were able to assign a habitual reading to aspectual be and remote past meaning to BIN even in some cases in which they did not perform well on elicitation tasks. This was also true for children who did not produce these markers in spontaneous speech. For instance, Z091 (4;5 years) got 67% correct answers in be scenarios, and he used aspectual be to elaborate on the characters and activities in a scenario. His narrative clearly indicated that he distinguished aspectual be and copula be and was proficient in producing both constructions, an overt be for the aspectual be construction and a Ø be for the copula be construction.
Data from elaboration and clarification strategies in elicitation tasks provide further insight into the type of patterns that children use in developing the AAE grammar and conversational styles.
Last Modified: October 19, 2004