The third issue in this series focuses on the impact of language variation on the development of written and oral language skills among African American children who speak African American English (AAE), including the impact of this variation on teacher and clinician beliefs and on assessment outcomes and practices. A key theme uniting the articles is an entreaty to recognize the strengths of children who speak AAE and the importance of asset-based approaches to assessing their young speakers.

The history of AAE in communication sciences and disorders has encompassed three major areas of focus: (1) establishing normative expectations (Holt et al, 2015; Pruitt & Oetting, 2009; Stockman et al, 2013); (2) disentangling disorder from difference (deVilliers et al, 2003; McGregor et al, 1997; Seymour et al, 1998), and (3) establishing alternative methods for assessments and interventions (Oetting & McDonald, 2002; Washington et al, 2023). The manuscripts in this issue continue in this vein, extending the current thinking to include normative developmental profiles for both literacy and language, as well as approaches to assessment that acknowledge and honor AAE children's linguistic competencies.

When language varieties are stigmatized, as has been the case for AAE historically, moving past stigmatization toward appreciation is often as much about dismantling negative attitudes as it is about presenting affirming data. Indeed, early sociolinguistic research was largely focused on documenting the legitimacy of AAE by demonstrating its rule-governed nature (Baugh, 1988; Kraemer et al, 2000; Labov, 1972). Previous investigations have demonstrated that even when teachers profess knowledge of AAE as a culturally supported language variety, they do not always value its use in the classroom (Newkirk-Turner et al, 2007; Washington & Iruka, 2025). In the first three papers of this volume, attitudes and beliefs of two critical stakeholder groups, teachers and speech language pathologists (SLPs), are examined. Scrivner et al examined beliefs regarding AAE use in classrooms using interviews with classroom teachers. Their findings suggested that teachers, regardless of their race, interpreted language variation in children's narratives negatively, expressing deficit-based views about linguistic differences that were characteristic of dialectal grammar and phonology. In the case of Black teachers, the authors determined that social and historical contexts and experiences with AAE shaped their views, compared with their non-Black colleagues, whose ideologies were more racialized. In a similar vein, O'Quin investigated the impact of dialectal variation on special education referrals. Despite teachers' claims that they valued language variation, fictional, written narratives that included AAE were 6.5 times more likely to result in recommendations for referral to special education than those written in general American English (GAE). These outcomes suggested that not only were teachers unable to distinguish impaired language from language variation, but their awareness of their own linguistic bias was negligible. Campbell et al explored how SLPs who were Black or White rated the written narratives of Black children in second grade. Their outcomes suggested no race-based differences in responses. However, ratings differed by type of narrative (fictional vs. personal) and use of AAE versus GAE grammar; Black students who used GAE were rated more favorably, whereas AAE was judged to be grammatically inaccurate. Taken together, these investigations point to the continued domination of mainstream language ideologies and the need for education (or re-education) of teachers and clinicians who work with Black children who are cultural dialect speakers.

Beyond attitudes and beliefs, general approaches to assessment that can be used by teachers and clinicians to honor and reconceptualize the framing of language varieties are the focus of the next two papers. Horton and Clark provide a comprehensive overview of AAE and its relationship to literate language. They encourage practitioners to move away from simply defining the literate language of African American children according to grammatical structure and instead to recognize the sociocultural influences that contribute to literate language use and development. Indeed, the authors urge clinicians and researchers to recognize how utilizing GAE structures to assess AAE speakers can contribute to a deficit narrative or, at worst, result in misdiagnosis and underestimation of the competencies that AAE-speaking children bring to the academic language context. Similarly, Johnson and Wyatt discuss the sociocultural, linguistic, and historical foundations of standardized testing with AAE speakers and the challenges that it presents. These authors make a compelling case for decreasing reliance on standardized assessments in favor of alternative frameworks that better represent the cultural and linguistic competence of AAE-speaking children. A common recommendation of both of these papers is to reduce dependence upon grammatical and standardized structures, and to move both toward increasing understanding of the sociocultural influences on children's performances and toward integration of these culturally-supported influences into our assessment protocols.

The final three papers in this volume address assessment more directly, using experimental data to examine the performances of Black children who use different language varieties on both standardized and nonstandardized assessments. These papers are designed to contribute important new information to our understanding of the normative profiles and performance of both AAE-speaking children and children who speak a Caribbean dialect, Guyanese Creole, thereby improving our ability to distinguish difference from disorder. Alexander et al compared the performance of AAE-speaking children and GAE-speakers on the BESS and DSS, language sample-based analyses of AAE and GAE morphosyntactic structure, respectively. They were interested in determining the effectiveness of these analyses for distinguishing dialect from disorder. Their results suggested that whereas BESS may minimize linguistic bias compared with DSS, neither measure was effective for identifying developmental language disorder. In Johnson et al, the relationships among oral language and reading profiles of school-aged African American children were explored. The authors identified distinct profiles of strengths and weaknesses that were influenced by the density of dialect used by participants. Similar to the findings of Murray et al (2024), their outcomes supported the importance of including both dialect use and oral language proficiency in our models when designing interventions for use with AAE speakers. Finally, Rose presents a different language variety for consideration as we continue to explore unbiased language assessments. Whereas the diagnostic evaluation of language variation (DELV) has been used primarily with African American speakers, it was designed to support the identification of language strengths, weaknesses, and disorders across language varieties. This paper presents a pilot test of an adapted version of the DELV for use with Guyanese Creole speakers (DELV-GC) compared with the norm-referenced version of the DELV (DELV-NR). Results were mixed but suggested that adaptation and more comprehensive psychometric validation would be fruitful, as Guyanese Creole speakers showed improved performance on the DELV-GC. This paper is an important demonstration of the need to differentiate across language varieties as we would across named languages.

Language and culture are inextricably tied. Children enter our schools and clinics as experts in the language used in their speech communities. This includes not only structural characteristics but also meaning and use. To equitably intervene, teach, and assess children who come from linguistically diverse backgrounds, the authors in this volume challenge us to always consider the sociocultural context that drives children's language use and to use this knowledge to drive our decision-making. Overall, the papers in this volume are consistent in their call to include AAE and other linguistic varieties in our professional development and university courses in ways designed to lead to equitable service delivery that honors the linguistic competence of Black children.

Article published online:
25 March 2026

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