Performance of Haitian Creole and African-American English Speakers on Three Tests of Language Ability

This study investigated the performance of Haitian Creole (HC) and African American English (AAE) speakers on three different measures of language ability. Specifically, the aim of this study was to determine if three measures of language ability accounted for performance differences in these two groups of speakers. A total of 68 children HC speakers (n=36) and AAE speakers (n=32) between the ages of 4;0 and 5;11 months participated in the study. All of the participants were administered the Preschool Language Scale-4 (PLS-4) and the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (DELV). Additionally, a subset of the participants were administered the Bilingual Verbal Ability Test (BVAT).;T-tests were conducted to analyze the data. AAE participants were found to perform significantly better than HC speakers on the PLS-4; whereas, no differences were found in the performance of AAE and HC speakers on the DELV. Likewise, intra-group differences were found between the performance of HC speakers on the BVAT and PLS-4; whereas no differences were found in the performance of HC speakers on the BVAT and DELV. Additionally, intra-group differences were found in the Overall and Expressive Communication scores of HC speakers when dialect versus SAE scoring was utilized on the PLS-4; whereas, no differences were found in performance of HC speakers on the Auditory Comprehension subtest of the PLS-4.