Type of Document	Dissertation
Author	Bass, Lori Ann
URN	etd-07092007-143526
Title	Effects of Interactive Storybook Reading on the Morphosyntactic Skills of Preschool Children from Low-Income Environments
Degree	Doctor of Philosophy
Department	Communication Disorders, Department of
Advisory Committee	Advisor Name Title Howard Goldstein Committee Chair Carol Connor Committee Member Kathryn Bojczyk Committee Member Lisa Scott Committee Member Shurita Thomas-Tate Committee Member
Keywords	African American English Standard American English Morphosyntax
Date of Defense	2007-06-27
Availability	unrestricted
Abstract Recent population-based statistics indicate that approximately two-thirds of African American students demonstrate poor reading achievement in the later elementary grades. The academic achievement gap between African American children and their mainstream culture peers is present at school entry and continues to widen over time. Clearly, the development of effective, early interventions to prevent and reduce the number of African American children exhibiting reading difficulties is warranted. This study investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of language instruction designed to increase the dialect sensitivity and familiarity with specific contrastive grammatical structures of Standard American English (SAE). The intervention used structural priming (Leonard et al., 2000, 2002) embedded into book reading activities to introduce specific SAE morphosyntatic constructions to African American English (AAE) speaking preschool children from low-income environments. The language instruction was intentionally designed to be independent of direct adult intervention and was presented under headphones in an automated listening center format. Seven typically developing children who were high density AAE speakers served as participants. A multiple baseline design across behaviors was used to determine if embedded structural primes and subsequent morphosyntactic practice were related to changes in children’s production and use of targeted SAE grammatical constructions. Specifically, Wh- questions, negation, third person singular, and regular past tense verb forms were targeted. Morphosyntactic production changes were observed and replicated within and across for two grammatical constructions for each of the seven participants during both weekly probes and weekly story retellings. Growth in production of the targeted SAE structures was also apparent when comparing children’s pre- and post-intervention performance on the Rice-Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment. Embedding an interactive morphosyntactic intervention employing structural priming into book reading activities independent of direct adult mediation resulted in gains in dialect sensitivity and familiarity with SAE for children who speak AAE from low-income environments and who are at-risk for later reading difficulties.
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