Monique Mills, assistant professor, Department of Speech and Hearing Science, is the author of a new study, “Narrative Performance of Gifted African American School-Aged Children From Low-Income Backgrounds,” published in the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. Mills’ study investigated classroom differences in the narrative performance of school-age African American English (AAE)-speaking children in gifted and general education classrooms.

Forty-three children, Grades 2–5, each generated fictional narratives in response to the book Frog, Where Are You? Differences in performance on traditional narrative measures (total number of communication units (C-units), number of different words and mean length of utterance in words and on AAE production between children in gifted and general education classrooms were examined.

There were no classroom-based differences in total number of C-units, number of different words, and mean length of utterance in words. Children in gifted education classrooms produced narratives with lower dialect density than did children in general educated classrooms. Direct logistic regression assessed whether narrative dialect density measure scores offered additional information about giftedness beyond scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test–Fourth Edition, a standard measure of language ability. Results indicated that a model with only Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test–Fourth Edition scores best discriminated children in the 2 classrooms.

"This study indicates that low-income African American children in gifted education classrooms differ from those in general education classrooms in terms of their dialect use as well as their vocabulary understanding, but not in terms of narrative length, vocabulary diversity, and sentence complexity," said Mills. "Moreover, the study suggests that advanced performance on standard vocabulary tests may be an index of traditional giftedness in both middle-income European American children and low-income African American children."

Mill's study provides clinicians and educators with basic expectations for language variation and ability in an understudied group—gifted African American children from low-income backgrounds.