Background: Numerous studies have observed a significant and unique relationship between children's use of nonmainstream dialect and reading outcomes. We aimed to examine the relationship between nonmainstream dialect and reading at its roots by completing a preliminary evaluation of the relationship between African American English (AAE) dialect and multiple dimensions of emergent literacy skills in young African American children enrolled in Head Start. Methods: Seventy-eight African American preschoolers completed the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening-PreK (PALS-PreK) and a narrative retell of the wordless picture book, Frog, Where Are You? The narratives were used to generate three measures of narrative productivity and the dialect density measure (DDM). Results: Structural equation modelling found that the PALS-PreK measures significantly loaded onto a single print-related emergent literacy latent variable and that the three narrative measures significantly loaded onto a single language-based emergent literacy latent variable. There was a significant relationship between print-related emergent literacy skills and DDM, but the overall model had a poor fit, showing that the relationship between emergent literacy and DDM was weak. Conclusions: We conclude the manuscript by discussing implications of this research and suggestions for further study. (author abstract)