DELV for use with Jamaican Creole speakers

Tue Mar 4 02:04:24 UTC 2014

Dear Kathleen,

As Tom Roeper indicated, I am happy to answer any questions about the DELV tests that I can.  Please write me with more details of the project you want to accomplish.

You might look into work by Janna Oetting of LSU.  She had an NIH grant to compare how well the DELV screener worked with speakers of different dialects, (but not Jamaican Creole).  I have a poster of hers with some results that she presented at a recent ASHA.  (Among other recommendations, she suggests that a ratio made from the scores on the Language Variation part of the DELV-ST was more "psychometrically robust" than the raw screener scores.  The poster refers you to a paper by Nicole Terry et al. 2010 that shows how to derive the ratio. (Jackson & Pearson also used a similar ratio in their papers on contrastive features.)

Jennifer Renn and *Mike* Terry have a 2009 paper in American Speech where they look at a variety of schemas for evaluating degree of dialect and found that a small set of features correlated highly with a larger set and was as effective as the larger set in measuring dialect.  Their findings may also be useful in guiding your thinking.

Meanwhile, please note that Oetting and her students' studies tend to use mostly the DELV Screening Test.  As a screening test, it is *designed* to err on the side of identifying too many individuals rather than failing to identify someone who would profit from a more comprehensive test.  The larger test, the DELV-NR, is relatively easy to administer and much more accurate.  Ondene van Dulm and Frenette Southwood, whom Tom mentioned, are getting a lot of data using the DELV-NR with several different language communities in South Africa.

Please share other responses you receive off-line.

Best wishes,
Barbara Pearson

************************************************
Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D.
Research Associate
Co-director, Language Acquisition Research Center
c/o Linguistics, 226 South College
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst MA 01003

bpearson at research.umass.edu<mailto:bpearson at research.umass.edu>
http://www.umass.edu/aae/bp_indexold.htm
http://www.zurer.com/pearson

On Mar 3, 2014, at 8:02 PM, Tom Roeper wrote:

Dear Kathleen---

The DELV is being adapted to South African Black English, has been translated into Afrikaans and is used
with adjustments for other populations.  The core phenomena are universal, but one does need to look
over the examples and see if they need to be adjusted for language or culture.
     Barbara Pearson at UMass is the person who manages the materials.  Others, like Frenette Southwood
and Ondene van Dulm might be available to advise you on how to do this adaptation.  They are also developing
very useful intervention materials.
     I would be happy to help if I can as well.

Tom Roeper

On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 4:02 PM, Kathleen Peets <kpeets at ryerson.ca<mailto:kpeets at ryerson.ca>> wrote:
Hello all,

I have a question about using the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation among speakers of Jamaican English or Jamaican Creole. I know that the test was originally designed to identify language disorders among speakers of non-standard English, in particular AAE. Has anyone used this measure outside of this population or outside of the U.S.?

We would be primarily interested in the screening tool which would identify dialect or degree of dialect. Alternate ideas for this population are also much appreciated.

Best,
Kathleen

--
Kathleen Peets
Assistant Professor
Early Childhood Studies
Ryerson University

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Tom Roeper
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UMass South College
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