Black children's perceptions of Black English

In studying the perception of differences between Black English and Standard English by 48 first-grade, urban, Black children, BE and SE were partitioned into content, i.e., syntax and lexicon, and style, i.e., suprasegmentals or prosodic features of phonology. A discrimination task was designed to test whether the subjects could perceive differences in terms of style or content or both. Accurate discriminations were related to language variety preference and school and home-street register maintenance. The results indicated BE style to be as significantly related to BE preference and register maintenance as BE content when the two were separated.