ABSTRACT
This chapter describes major characteristics of student production of African American English (AAE). It identifies the key dialectal features used by AAE-speaking children, and the widely-used approach to measure AAE-feature usage. Children learn the rules of the language in their communities over time, and, thus, the understanding of child AAE requires the study of young speakers not just the study of adults, and of children's linguistic changes as they mature. The morpheme omissions that define these features can contribute to the false impression by some that AAE is a subtraction from SAE in which the African American speakers leave things out and are speaking in an incomplete manner. Nicole Patton-Terry's research, however, indicates that AAE-speaking students have extensive knowledge of the phonological representation of Standard American English (SAE) words, and do not appear to be confused by feature differences between AAE and SAE. Dialect Density Measures (DDMs) are a relatively recent rate measurement tool developed to help characterize patterns of student AAE production.
