Poster - #VH-06969 - Keywords: style-shifting; school-age language; creole languages

Style-Shifting Among Hawai‘i Creole (Pidgin) Speaking Children

Bethany F Schwartz (1,2), Kiana-Rae Vendetta (2), and Theres Grüter (2)
(1) California State University – Monterey Bay, (2) University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

ABSTRACT:
Children who speak non-standardized varieties of English are at risk for both over- and under-referral to speech-language and special education services (Pearson et al., 2014). Bilingual and bidialectal children are also known to adapt their use of language according to context and/or interlocutor (Gutiérrez-Clellen et al., 2009; Washington et al., 1998). An early study by Agerton and Moran (1995) found that samples elicited by a Black African-American-Language (AAL)-speaker contained more AAL-features than those elicited by either a White standardized-American-English (SAE)-speaker or a Black SAE-speaker. Unlike the rich literature on AAL-speaking and bilingual children, very little research exists on style-shifting among Hawai‘i Creole (locally called “Pidgin”; Sakoda & Siegel, 2003) speaking children (Day, 1972; Purcell, 1979). In this exploratory study, we draw on insights from these related literatures to examine how (i) interlocutor language and (ii) dialect exposure influence the density of dialect features in the speech of children living in a community where both Pidgin and SAE are widely used and discuss implications for the identification of children as Pidgin-speakers in educational and clinical contexts. Methods: Fourteen children (Mage=8;1, range 4;11-10;11) participated in story retell tasks with two different experimenters, a Pidgin- and an SAE-speaker. Information on exposure to Pidgin was obtained through semi-structured interviews with parents, administered by the Pidgin-speaking experimenter, using an adapted version of the PABIQ (Tuller, 2015). A native bidialectal speaker created and recorded SAE and Pidgin narrations for each of two wordless picture books with locally appropriate content. In two sessions, each child listened to one book in SAE or in Pidgin (counterbalanced) and was invited to retell the story to a speaker of the same variety. Retells were transcribed in CHAT and coded for dialect features to calculate Pidgin density measures (PDM; Pidgin-tokens over utterances; Grama, 2015) for each story. Results: We observed a trend toward higher PDMs in the Pidgin- than the SAE-context (Z=-1.69, p=.091; Fig1), suggestive of at least some context and/or interlocutor conditioned style-shifting, granted that language choices in story retells reflect underlying language skills rather than memory alone (Klem et al., 2015). Two participants produced Pidgin tokens only in the Pidgin-context. We also observed an overall trend towards a positive correlation between mean PDM and current exposure to Pidgin as indexed by parent report (rs(12)=.422, p=.133); Fig2), but note that some parents were reluctant to report use of Pidgin. Findings from this small-scale study provide at least tentative evidence that child Pidgin-speakers adapt their language use according to context. Given Pidgin’s historical development as a pan-ethnic language (Roberts, 2004), speaker race/ethnicity is not a reliable indicator of language variety. Educators and clinicians seeking to identify Pidgin-speaking children may find eliciting language samples with both SAE- and Pidgin-speaking interlocutors to be an important tool. Parent interviews may also be helpful with the caveat that not all parents will be fully forthcoming about this often-stigmatized variety. Correct identification of these children has clinical and educational implications for the unbiased assessment of language development (de Villiers, 2017) in this historically underserved population.