"African American English (AAE) dialect speakers have unique speech production demands regarding the environment and linguistic production. This study observes the acoustic impact of these variables and the relationship between the occurrence of select AAE phonological features and disfluency occurrences from 19 African American adults from the South and other regions of upbringing. Results of this study reveal a positive correlation between AAE dialect feature occurrences and disfluencies presented during a story retell task for participants from the Southern region. Additional findings revealed significance in the variation of AAE dialect feature use between female and male participants as well as participants from the Southern region. Clinical implications of this study show the need to observe naturalistic speech across environments and the need for better understanding of perceptual judgment and disfluency for AAE dialect speakers."--Page ii.
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