African-American English (AAE) is a dialect of English (just like British or Australian English) spoken predominantly by African-Americans in the US. AAE is associated with distinct grammatical features, such as the lack of the verb "to be" (as in "She said her name [was] Shayeeda", from LL Cool J's song "Control Myself") and vocabulary items (such as "shorty" to refer to a woman or girl). With this study, I asked if musical tastes, specifically a preference for hip-hop music, can predict AAE vocabulary knowledge above and beyond ethnicity, social network phenomena, and general pop-culture knowledge (alternative explanations for knowledge of AAE vocabulary). 

I asked 168 participants (students enrolled in undergraduate linguistics, sociology, and music classes at the University of Minnesota) to freely define 64 AAE vocabulary items, and then I asked them to self-report a series of demographic questions. The information reported in the paper is for the 166 participants who were not African-American. For many of these questions, including the response variable, a coding scheme was established to transform open-set definitions to a five-point Likert scale. A description of each variable in the dataset "aae.csv" is below:

==DEPENDENT MEASURE/RESPONSE VARIABLE==
-- familiarity: a participant's familiarity with an individual vocabulary item. How well the participant knows the definition; 1 = not at all, 5 = well. 
-- fam1: binary familiarity measure; not at all (0) vs. 2-5 on the above scale (1).

==DEMOGRAPHIC VARIABLES==
-- subj: pseudonym for each participant.
-- sex: participant's sex (Male/Female). 
-- age: participant's age. Age and sex were included as possible predictors, but did not reach significance.
-- city: population, using 2009 US Census data, of participants' hometowns.
-- county: population, using 2009 US Census data, of participants' home counties.
-- countyBlack: African-American population, using 2009 US Census data, of participants' home counties.
-- ethnic: participant's ethnicity. This variable is simplified due to sparsity of data, and I have chosen to work with the following ethnicities: 
   - African-American ("black"), 
   - African/Middle-Eastern ("african"; our participants distinguished between African such as Somali and African-American); 
   - Asian or Asian-American ("asian"); 
   - European-American ("white"), 
   - Hispanic ("hispanic"), 
   - South Asian ("indian"), 
   - Native American ("native"). 
   - "unknown": ethnicity not given.

==SOCIAL NETWORK VARIABLES==
-- the series of "*Move" variables: the number of strong ties (friends, family) participants report that they would ask to help them move from a given ethnicity. Here the ethnicities "african" and "indian" from above are collapsed into "SAAMEMove" variable due to data sparsity  as described in the paper. Missing values were replaced with mean values in these variables.
-- blackWeekly: the number of strong and weak ties (friends and family, but also acquaintances) to African-Americans, as gauged by the question "How many African-Americans do you have contact with on a weekly basis?" Again, missing values were replaced with mean values.

==MUSIC VARIABLES==
-- The next variables detail genres of music that participants like. The numbers in these columns are the number of artists participants report liking in a specific genre (the genres were manually classified). There is no easy way to classify genres, but for our purposes the following nine genres should be sufficient:
   - intl: international music.
   - vocal: vocal/jazz/musicals.
   - classical: classical and any classical movie soundtracks.
   - folk: folk/bluegrass.
   - rock: hard rock, rock 'n' roll, punk, metal.
   - country: country.
   - pop: pop music. 
   - alternative: alternative, indie.
   - hiphop: hiphop, rap, the primary genre of interest to us. 
   - unclassifiable: the number of unclassifiable artists was small, but I am also including this information.

-- numOverallArtists: number of overall hiphop artists having used the word in question in their songs. N.B. This and the following variable were only examined in the follow-up analysis for the subset of participants having listed listening to at least one hiphop artist.
-- numPreferredArtists: number of preferred hiphop artists having used the word in question in their songs.
-- popularityScore: for each word listed, the number of times all artists using that word were listed by participants.

==POP-CULTURE VARIABLES==
-- The next variables deal with participants' general knowledge of pop culture and were again rated on a 1-5 Likert scale. I asked five questions to see how well they are familiar with white and black pop-culture references:
   - jayz: "Is Jay-Z married, and if so, to whom?"
   - jayz1: Binary response to the above question.
   - barkley: "What TV network is Charles Barkley a commentator for?"
   - boondocks: "Name a character from the Boondocks."
   - boondocks1: Binary response to the above question.
   - monique: "Who is Mo'Nique?"
   - bieber: "Name up to five Justin Bieber songs." Love him or hate him, he figures prominently in pop culture! :D This question is rated as 1 - 6, 1 for no song listing, and 2 - 6 being the number of songs listed + 1 (a score of 6 indicated 5 correct JB songs listed).


==EXPERIMENTAL ITEMS==
-- word: the vocabulary item tested (64 total).
-- trial: as the order of items was randomized separately for each participant, I included the trial index (the position in the list in which participants see the word -- range: 1 - 64) to measure for potential effects of increasing fatigue/apathy throughout the survey. This predictor was not significant.