Rickford John R, Duncan Greg J, Gennetian Lisa A, Gou Ray Yun, Greene Rebecca, Katz Lawrence F, Kessler Ronald C, Kling Jeffrey R, Sanbonmatsu Lisa, Sanchez-Ordoñez Andres E, Sciandra Matthew, Thomas Ewart, Ludwig Jens
Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305;
School of Education, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697;
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2015 Sep 22;112(38):11817-22. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1500176112. Epub 2015 Sep 8.
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is systematic, rooted in history, and important as an identity marker and expressive resource for its speakers. In these respects, it resembles other vernacular or nonstandard varieties, like Cockney or Appalachian English. But like them, AAVE can trigger discrimination in the workplace, housing market, and schools. Understanding what shapes the relative use of AAVE vs. Standard American English (SAE) is important for policy and scientific reasons. This work presents, to our knowledge, the first experimental estimates of the effects of moving into lower-poverty neighborhoods on AAVE use. We use data on non-Hispanic African-American youth (n = 629) from a large-scale, randomized residential mobility experiment called Moving to Opportunity (MTO), which enrolled a sample of mostly minority families originally living in distressed public housing. Audio recordings of the youth were transcribed and coded for the use of five grammatical and five phonological AAVE features to construct a measure of the proportion of possible instances, or tokens, in which speakers use AAVE rather than SAE speech features. Random assignment to receive a housing voucher to move into a lower-poverty area (the intention-to-treat effect) led youth to live in neighborhoods (census tracts) with an 11 percentage point lower poverty rate on average over the next 10-15 y and reduced the share of AAVE tokens by ∼3 percentage points compared with the MTO control group youth. The MTO effect on AAVE use equals approximately half of the difference in AAVE frequency observed between youth whose parents have a high school diploma and those whose parents do not.
非裔美国黑人英语（AAVE）是自成体系的，有着深厚的历史根源，并且作为其使用者的身份标识和表达资源非常重要。在这些方面，它类似于其他方言或非标准变体，比如伦敦腔或阿巴拉契亚英语。但和它们一样，AAVE在工作场所、住房市场和学校中可能引发歧视。出于政策和科学方面的原因，了解是什么因素影响了AAVE和标准美国英语（SAE）的相对使用情况很重要。据我们所知，这项研究首次通过实验估计了搬到贫困率较低的社区对AAVE使用的影响。我们使用了来自一项名为“搬到机会”（MTO）的大规模随机居住流动性实验中的非西班牙裔非裔美国青年（n = 629）的数据，该实验招募了一个主要由原本居住在破旧公共住房中的少数族裔家庭组成的样本。对这些青年的音频记录进行了转录，并针对五种语法和五种语音方面的AAVE特征进行编码，以构建一种衡量指标，即说话者使用AAVE而非SAE语音特征的可能实例或标记的比例。随机分配获得住房券以搬到贫困率较低的地区（意向性治疗效应），使得青年在接下来的10 - 15年里平均居住在贫困率低11个百分点的社区（普查区），与MTO对照组青年相比，AAVE标记的比例降低了约3个百分点。MTO对AAVE使用的影响大约相当于父母拥有高中文凭的青年和父母没有高中文凭的青年在AAVE使用频率上观察到的差异的一半。
