Impact of Dialect Use, Executive Functioning, and Metalinguistic Awareness on Dialect Awareness

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the underlying factors related to dialect awareness in second, third, and fourth grade students. Eighty-seven students were administered measures of written and spoken dialect usage, dialect awareness, executive functioning, metalinguistic awareness, and language ability. Performance on each measure was analyzed to determine whether differences were seen by dialect usage group (strong, some, or no variation from Mainstream American English). Students who used the least amounts of morphsyntactic non-Mainstream American English features outperformed their peers on all measures. Correlational analyses showed that increased performance on measures of executive functioning, metalinguistic awareness, and language was significantly related to increased performance on dialect awareness tasks. Hierarchal multiple regression analyses showed that language skills accounted for most of the variation in dialect awareness performance, while cognitive shifting and blending abilities accounted for an additional small amount of variance. While dialect awareness is a complex task to measure, clinical implications of this investigation suggest that strong overall language abilities are needed to successfully increase dialect awareness. Students who are having difficulty with dialect awareness may benefit from a program that addresses these skills explicitly, while also targeting overall language.