There are two groups of children who use African American language forms who are misdiagnosed with the current evaluation tools. First are those whose application of grammatical deletions and other dialect forms are misinterpreted as having some speech or cognitive problems. A second group are those children whose dialect usage masks communication disorders. And those children need intervention, they need to be assessed and they need to be treated for the difficulties that they're having. Craig points out that children with language disorders that go untreated not only miss out on developing the language skills they need to succeed in school, but they also miss out on skills they need to develop friendships.
Young children rely on their verbal abilities to communicate.
Those with untreated language disorders often cannot express themselves and are ostracized by their peers. Craig and Washington do not blame school systems for not being able to accurately identify children with language disorders. And we don't know yet what normal development looks like in this population. Julie Washington Craig and Washington are determining the grammatical and phonetic rules and unique words that comprise the everyday language for speakers of African American dialect. In addition, they are developing profiles of communication disorders for this population.