Pronouns In African American Adults

African American Adults and the Management of Reference
Ethnic features of language are manifested as differences in narrative style and dialect. As a community, African Americans utilize dialectal patterns and surface structure markings of referential forms uniquely different from mainstream referential expressions. Among these is the overuse of pronominal apposition (Joey, he drove my car) (Rickford, 1992), the associative plural strategy for pronominal use (Sonny and them) (Rickford 1986), reflexive pronouns (They had theyself a good time) (Rickford 1986), additions (We laughed and we sang) (Rickford, 1992), subject deletions (i.e., ellipses) (Ø come with me) (Sutcliffe & Wong, 1986); consecutivization, where one event is coupled with

She took care of me. She didn’t have anybody else with her. And through her faith as a Christian, she helped me a whole lot. She died when I was about four or five. But it was her love for me that got me through a lot of things”). Consequently, pronominal AAE variants will contribute to an overuse of pronouns as is typically seen in the narratives of mainstream older adults (c.f., Ulatowska et al., 1986). Similarly, ellipses as with pronominal references, are commonly used in referential chains (e.g., “Years ago, when I was a little girl, my daddy believed in showing me the better things of life. Ø showed me the fun things of life, Ø took me to the circus, Ø took me to the zoo, Ø showed me a good

It was hypothesized that (a) older adults will exhibit a pattern of pronominal inflation in both story-retelling and in personal narratives compared to younger adults, (b) older adults will produce fewer explicit nominal references in both narrative conditions compared to younger adults, and (c) the complexity of the story-retelling task would stress the language system of older adults more fully than the personal