Spelling and dialect: Comparisons between speakers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE ) and White speakers

Melnikova Olga 211-2

Spelling and dialect: Comparisons between speakers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE ) and White speakers

By Rebecca Treiman

The primary focus of the paper is to study and review the effects of dialects (African American Vernacular English and General American) on spelling among adults and children. This study is an attempt to address the issues of generality, phonology comparing AAVE and General American. The phonological characteristic of AAVE of interest in the given work was the devoicing of final obstruents which was compared to the absence of this feature in General American. This paper will address only a couple of phonetic phenomena of the dialects stated above.

The paper uses the data collected by Treiman and Barry, furthermore, it goes beyond that. According to Treiman, one characteristic of AAVE is final obstruent devoicing, where  the final consonant [d] is pronounced more like [t].The main point under research was to determine whether this dialect characteristic influences adults’ spelling. A second issue addressed by the present study concerned the nature of dialect-related spelling effects. The main theoretical premise behind this issue is that spellers might symbolize the resulting sound-segments with the most associated letters. This seems to occur when U. S. children spell words like ‘city’, ‘lady’ incorrectly. Children often use d when t is appropriate (e. g., sidy for city). Children are unlikely to make the reverse error. But on the other hand, adults have knowledge that flaps can be spelled as d and t, make errors in both directions (e. g., autoble for audible, loider for loiter).

The main component of the article is a detailed research on the topic stated above. In the present study, there were 40 words selected. Twenty of them had an unstressed final syllable [d] (e. g., rigid), some of them were common and some were less common. The other 20 words ended with an unstressed syllable [t].  The participants were told that they would have to spell these words and rate their familiarity on a 7-point scale. The participants were all native speakers of English. The locus of the study was the Detroit area and it was a reasonable geographic mean. Detroit area is the most racially segregated metropolitan area in the US. African American and whites live in different neighborhoods, attend different schools.   The city of Detroit has over 80 % Black residents.

Of primary interest of the case study were voicing errors in spelling, those in which final d and t are interchanged. Although there has been little research on spelling and dialects, a good deal of variability was observed. As a result of the study we are able to come up with a few conclusions. First, voicing errors were more common for African American rather than white.

Concerning the first issue discussed in the introduction, that of generality, the findings shows that adults’ spelling is effected by occurrence for pairs of dialects. Current research seems to validate the view that for both African American and White participants, voicing errors were more common when the experimenter was African American rather than White. Moreover, the results suggest that even experienced spellers attempt to construct words’ spelling from the words’ phonological forms.

To summarize this article I would like to add that the effect of AAVE may be indirect. In some other cases certain characteristics of AAVE may directly affect reading and spelling. The present results show that phonological as well as syntactic factors must be considered when one examines the effects of AAVE on literacy.