This study examined the extent to which linguistic variation in the English language might have been affecting the performance of 160 rural preschool children in Orangeburg, South Carolina, on four commonly used standardized tests. The children, ages 3-0 to 5-11 years, were administered the Patterned Elicitation Syntax Test, the Test of Auditory Comprehension of Language-Revised, the Test of Language Development-2 Primary, and the Test of Pragmatic Skills. Results revealed that when dialectal variations were not considered, the performance of children in this study differed from that of the normative population on tests that assessed grammatical morphemes.
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