Isolation Within Isolation: A Solitary Century of African-American Vernacular English

The nature of language diversity in small, isolated communities is considered by examining a unique sociolingustic situation in which a one African-American family has resided for over 130 years on a small island community located off the Southeastern coast of the United States. The Anglo-American community maintained a distinctive dialect due to their isolation from the mainland United States, while the sole African-American family maintained a variety heavily influenced by African-American Vernacular English. Although some assimilation to the surrounding Anglo-American variety has taken place, a number of salient African-American Vernacular English features are still used by the single African-American resident of the island. At the same time, the most marked items of the Anglo-American Outer Banks variety have not been assimilated, thus demonstrating the symbolic exclusion of the African-American speaker from the Anglo community despite her life-long residency.     

Coming of age in African American English: A longitudinal study1

This study examines trajectories of development in the use of African American English (AAE) for 32 speakers through the first 17 years of their lives based on a unique, longitudinal database. Temporal data points in the analysis include 48 months, Grade 1 (about age 6), Grade 4 (about age 9), Grade 6 (about age 11), Grade 8 (about age 13), and Grade 10 (about age 15). Complementary methods of analysis for assessing AAE include a token‐based Dialect Density Measure (DDM), a type‐based vernacular diversity index, and frequency‐based variation analysis. The study reveals different trajectories and peak periods for the use of AAE, including a ‘roller coaster’ and a curvilinear trajectory; at the same time, there is a common dip among speakers in the overall use of vernacular AAE from Grade 1 through Grade 4. Examination of a selective set of demographic and self‐regard measures shows no significant differences for gender, school racial density, racial peer contacts, and measures of Afro‐centrality, but does show a significant correlation between mothers’ and child use of AAE as well as age/grade.     

Emerging Hispanic English: New dialect formation in the American South

Although stable Hispanic populations have existed in some regions of the United States for centuries, other regions, including the mid‐Atlantic South, are just experiencing the emergence of permanent Hispanic communities. This situation offers an ideal opportunity to examine the dynamics of new dialect formation in progress, and the extent to which speakers acquire local dialect traits as they learn English as a second language. We focus on the production of the /ai/ diphthong among adolescents in two emerging Hispanic communities, one in an urban and one in a rural context. Though both English and Spanish have the diphthong /ai/, the Southern regional variant of the benchmark local dialect norm is unglided, thus providing a local dialect alternative. The instrumental analysis of /ai/ shows that there is not pervasive accommodation to the local norm by Hispanic speakers learning English. There is, however, gradient, incremental adjustment of the /ai/, and individual speakers who adopt local cultural values may accommodate to the local dialect pattern.     

First-marriage decrement tables by color and sex for the United States in 1958–60

A new set of first-marriage tables is compared with earlier tables that were prepared by Grabill and Jacobson. The new tables show, among other things, the number of first marriages, first-marriage probabilities, and death probabilities for single persons in a stationary (life table) population by color and sex, based on 1960 Census data on marital status and age at first marriage and on general mortality rates for 1959-61. A comparison of the earlier tables with the new tables provides evidence of a decrease of one or two years in the average age at first marriage between 1920-40 and 1958-60 and an increasing tendency for first marriages to be concentrated within a narrower span of years. The prospects for eventual marriage have risen to the point where it is estimated that all but 3 to 5 percent of the young adults are expected eventually to marry. This development has gone so far that the main question remaining is not whether young people will ever marry, but at what age they will marry.     

Gatekeeping procedures in dose-response clinical trials based on the Dunnett test

This paper discusses multiple testing procedures in dose-response clinical trials with primary and secondary endpoints. A general gatekeeping framework for constructing multiple tests is proposed, which extends the Dunnett test [Journal of the American Statistical Association 1955; 50: 1096-1121] and Bonferroni-based gatekeeping tests developed by Dmitrienko et al. [Statistics in Medicine 2003; 22:2387-2400]. The proposed procedure accounts for the hierarchical structure of the testing problem; for example, it restricts testing of secondary endpoints to the doses for which the primary endpoint is significant. The multiple testing approach is illustrated using a dose-response clinical trial in patients with diabetes. Monte-Carlo simulations demonstrate that the proposed procedure provides a power advantage over the Bonferroni gatekeeping procedure. The power gain generally increases with increasing correlation among the endpoints, especially when all primary dose-control comparisons are significant.     

Politics and fertility: a new approach to population policy analysis

This paper aims to explain why divergentpopulation policies and programs arise in otherwisesimilar countries and to clarify how such policiesrelate to fertility decline. An analysis wasundertaken of demographic and policy change over a 30year period in four pairs of developing countries: Algeria and Tunisia; Bangladesh and Pakistan; thePhilippines and Thailand; and Zambia and Zimbabwe. Insome countries, popular demand for family planningfacilitated changing policy. In others, independentfactors, such as economic crisis or internationalpressure, pushed policy makers into action onpopulation policy, often in the absence of populardemand. In these countries, governments whichidentified a coherent rationale, usually economic, forreducing population growth, tended to develop moresuccessful policies. Strong and financially securecoalitions of policy elites were important in sharingthe political risk associated with such policies. Analysis of these processes has lessons for policymakers and researchers interested in expeditingimplementation of new approaches to population andreproductive health.