Chapter 4. Approaching Developmental Language Disorder from a Disorder within Dialects framework

Abstract

Disorder within Dialects is a new framework that has helped guide a series of studies on childhood Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) within African American English (AAE) and Southern White American English (SWAE), two dialects spoken in the southern region of the United States. In this chapter, I review the basic tenets of the Disorder with Dialects framework, contrasting it with the traditional Dialect vs. Disorder framework. Then, focusing on children’s use of finite markers within AAE and SWAE and using data from several published studies, I demonstrate how dialect-informed materials and strategic scoring systems can be used to identify children with DLD within these dialects and perhaps within other linguistic varieties spoken in the United States and elsewhere.