Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between oral language, literacy skills, age, and dialect density (DD) of African American children residing in two different geographical regions of the United States (East Coast and Midwest). Method Data were obtained from 64 African American school-age children between the ages of 7 and 12 years from two geographic regions. Children were assessed using a combination of standardized tests and narrative samples elicited from wordless picture books. Bivariate correlation and multiple regression analyses were used to determine relationships to and relative contributions of oral language, literacy, age, and geographic region to DD. Results Results of correlation analyses demonstrated a negative relationship between DD measures and children's literacy skills. Age-related findings between geographic regions indicated that the younger sample from the Midwest outscored the East Coast sample in reading comprehension and sentence complexity. Multiple regression analyses identified five variables (i.e., geographic region, age, mean length of utterance in morphemes, reading fluency, and phonological awareness) that accounted for 31% of the variance of children's DD-with geographic region emerging as the strongest predictor. Conclusions As in previous studies, the current study found an inverse relationship between DD and several literacy measures. Importantly, geographic region emerged as a strong predictor of DD. This finding highlights the need for a further study that goes beyond the mere description of relationships to comparing geographic regions and specifically focusing on racial composition, poverty, and school success measures through direct data collection.

中文翻译：

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来自两个地理区域的学龄非洲裔美国儿童中方言密度的语言和读写能力预测指标。

目的这项研究的目的是调查居住在美国两个不同地理区域（东海岸和中西部）的非洲裔美国儿童的口语，读写能力，年龄和方言密度（DD）之间的关系。方法数据来自两个地区的64位7至12岁的非洲裔美国学龄儿童。使用标准化测试和从无语图画书中得出的叙述性样本的组合对儿童进行评估。使用双变量相关和多元回归分析来确定与口头语言，读写能力，年龄和地理区域对DD的关系和相对贡献。结果相关性分析的结果表明DD测度与儿童的识字能力之间存在负相关关系。地理区域之间与年龄相关的发现表明，来自中西部的年轻样本在阅读理解和句子复杂度方面比东海岸样本高。多元回归分析确定了五个变量（即地理区域，年龄，语素的平均发音长度，阅读流利度和语音意识），占儿童DD方差的31％，而地理区域成为最强的预测指标。结论与以前的研究一样，本研究发现DD与几种扫盲措施之间存在反比关系。重要的是，地理区域成为DD的有力预测指标。这一发现突出表明，有必要进行进一步的研究，而不仅仅是对关系的描述，而是对地理区域进行比较，并特别关注种族构成，