Labov (1972) expresses that a major goal of the sociolinguist is to locate "the most consistent and reliable data for describing the grammar of the speech community." The sociolinguistic interview is designed, therefore, to elicit the most vernacular speech possible in order to describe the dialect that is native to the speaker. Research on African-American Vernacular English has used speech produced in the sociolinguistic interview to show that AAVE is a separate, coherent language system. When African-American children who are speakers of AAVE start school, they enter a linguistic environment where they are expected to produce Standard American English. Yet, little is known about the wide-scale linguistic and communicative competence with respect to SAE of current inner city African-American children.
    Research on variation and style-shifting in African-American adolescents and adults, including Baugh (1979) and Rickford and McNair-Knox (1995,) has demonstrated that variation in the use of AAVE features within a speaker occurs with respect to differences in the race of the interviewer, the interviewer’s style and register, and the topic of the interview. Speakers in these situations have acquired communicative competence in the relationship of SAE to AAVE, and use the two varieties of English as they judge them to be socially appropriate.
    Hymes (1981) describes the stages of communicative competence. First speakers acquire the passive knowledge of linguistic features that are used outside of their own vernacular. Speakers then acquire some of the features of other dialects and produce them in a situation of linguistic shift. Ultimately speakers must be able to control their use of different features and manipulate their use for social reasons. Communicative competence is essential for utilitarian purposes, such as promotion in the workplace and academic success. Communicative competence may also be used in order to assert identity and belief in social and community ideals. Hymes asserts that children who are linguistically competent, but lack communicative competence may be seen as "social monsters."
    Communicative competence in a second dialect may occur as a result as a result of many different external factors including: language development related to age, increased social contact, and education. Studies of dialect acquisition have often linked proficiency in the standard dialect with measures that require literacy. Baugh (2001) describes problems in assessing stylistic variation due to the difficulty that some adult speakers have with formal sociolinguistic tests as a result of limited reading ability. Beginning readers and pre-readers share this problem.
    Linguistic and communicative competence in a second language (bilingualism) are widely studied phenomena. But acquisition of a second language is different than the acquisition of a second dialect. In the acquisition of Standard American English by speakers of African-American English, there are two factors at work that may drastically change the acquisition typology of SAE: inherent variation and mutual intelligibility.
    Speakers learn some new features as they acquire a new dialect, but they may also manipulate the rates of features that may already be in their systems. Features such as double negation, the unmarked possessive, and the unmarked plural occur at higher rates in AAVE than features such as copula deletion, and consonant cluster reduction. The success of the acquisition of these different types of features may vary widely from individual to individual as differences become more apparent and speakers attempt to master their use. Mutual intelligibility may impede the speaker’s acquisition of variable features, because he or she thinks (on some level) that the language she is producing is the same as the standard. Socially marked features, which are often stable linguistic variables, may be used nearly all of the time in a speaker’s vernacular. But in a contact situation, use of constant features may approach zero as the speaker acquires communicative competence and realizes that use of these features is greatly stigmatized in the contact situation.
    Sociolinguistic studies to date have focused on the relation of phonological, phonetic, syntactic, and morphosyntactic features. Interaction of prosody and language change and variation is not widely understood. Cruttenden (1986) states that differences in African-American and white prosody are widely attested but have not been examined in sociolinguistic surveys. Differences in intonation contours have been reported and even imitated by speakers as they relate what it is to "sound black" or "talk white." It is not clear if prosody is among the elements that are acquired as part of linguistic competence in another dialect. If prosody is among the features a second dialect learner acquires, prosodic communicative competence in the school setting may vary with the speaker’s notions of linguistic authenticity and social acceptability.
    The first part of this dissertation will attempt to discover what range of linguistic and communicative competence young inner city children have in the school setting with respect to the phonological and morphosyntactic features of SAE. Sentence imitation and story retell will be examined as methods that may elicit more formal varieties of speech without the prerequisite of literacy. The use of AAVE phonological and morphosyntactic features in a sentence repetition task will be compared to the use of AAVE features in the story retell. Comparison of the two speech tasks will be used in order to determine if children are more likely to produce more formal speech in the school setting when presented with immediate, direct SAE stimulus, than when they are free to tell the story in their own words. The children's linguistic competence in SAE will then be examined in order to find out if children are more likely to use the SE forms of features that are invariant in AAVE or manipulate the rates of features that are variable within the AAVE system. Comparisons will be made within each child, and for the children overall. Results will be reported with respect to gender, grade, school, city, and memory ability. Special attention will be paid to differences between children at the beginning of their school career and children who have had more exposure to school language. Results will be compared to rates established in previous studies of AAVE to see if changes have occurred over time. Comparison of the rates of use of SAE in this sample will be made to the rates of use of SAE in other studies of sentence imitation including Labov (1972) and Baratz (1969) in order to see if children in this study have more competence in SAE than children of two generations prior. Rates of SAE production will also be compared to other studies that have looked at mesolectal varieties of African American English, including Wolfram (1969) and the speech collected as part of the current Urban Minorities Reading Project at the University of Pennsylvania.
    The second part of this dissertation will examine prosodic features of SAE and AAVE as sociolinguistic variables. Analysis of prosodic mismatches between teachers and students will help to determine how SAE prosody is included in the children's acquisition of SE linguistic and communicative competence. This analysis will also help answer questions of whether prosody is more difficult to mimic and/or acquire than other SE linguistic variables. Elementary school teachers will then be given matched guise tests that will ask them to judge the desirability of different combinations of SAE and AAVE phonological, morphosyntactic, and prosodic features. Teachers will be asked what the use of different AAVE features indicates about the likely academic achievement and ability of the students. Teacher judgments will be used in order to determine which features of AAVE are most stigmatized in the school environment.