Tucked away in the basement of Hatcher Hall, a University professor studies the identification of communication impairment in a way that questions the norm and focuses on diversity rather than conformity.
Janna Oetting, communication sciences and disorders professor and speech pathologist, is in the midst of researching Southern white and African-American English dialects in children and scoping out a way to accurately separate those who have communication impairments from those who do not.
Oetting said some teachers view dialects in children as inferior, and they send the student to speech class where he or she may be misclassified. On the other hand, Oetting said some children who have language impairments go unidentified with the impairment being mistaken for a dialect.
The assessments to test language impairment come only in mainstream American English, and there are no tests designed for those with dialects, she said. Therefore, children who do not have this mainstream dialect can be more easily misdiagnosed.
Oetting said 7 percent of kindergartners will have a language impairment, but some of them are overlooked because they communicate effectively.
“They might not learn to read until closer to fourth grade,” she said.
To prevent this from happening, Oetting said she and several graduate students travel to area schools to interact with children for 20 to 30 minutes. She said they use language kits with toys to entice children to speak.
Speech pathologists must remain quiet in order to let the child speak, allowing them to analyze the child’s speech.
“Children don’t like the silence, and that presses them to fill it,” Oetting said.
Oetting said through her research, she is trying to identify language structures with which speech-impaired children struggle and develop tools to help other pathologists in testing these particular dialects.
Oetting said she will also document the dialects because not many people scientifically study Southern dialects.
Oetting said compared to languages like Hebrew and Italian, all English dialects have more in common than not.
Oetting explained a standard English phrase may be, “He is walking,” while the same phrase in Southern dialect would be something like, “He walking.”
This phrase would be contrastive, or different, among different dialects. Oetting said concepts like “the” or “a” coming before nouns in a sentence would be noncontrastive, or dialect-neutral.
Tests usually evaluate in noncontrastive ways where structures in both dialects are the same, she said. The problem lies in not using structures that differ, like verb structures.
“If you go around these structures and you don’t include them, you are not doing a service for the kids,” Oetting said.
Eleanor Canon, speech pathologist at the LSU Laboratory School, said she uses the mainstream English test for students, but would use nonmainstream English tests if the school was more multicultural.
Canon said she does not want to step on anyone’s toes for trying to “fix” a child’s English and always talks to the child’s parents to see if the way the child speaks stems from a dialect spoken at home.
“We’re trying to erase any variations, and I don’t want to do that,” Canon said.
Though there are dialects of power in the world, for example, a mainstream English dialect, Oetting said a child should never want to lose his or her own dialect.
She said Louisianians’ Cajun ancestors were slapped on the hand for speaking French in school, but now people approach the situation from a view of value to be able to speak two dialects.
“You think, [these children] are going to be able to do something that other people cannot do,” she said.
