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“Nationally, only 29 percent of kindergarteners with Specific dialect. The study of language development and language Language Impairment [SLI] are identified and receive any impairment for non-standard dialects is therefore a support or assistance; we believe the rate is even lower in pressing need. Louisiana because of issues related to the understudy of In July 2009, the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, our dialects,” said Oetting. “This is troubling because we recognized the importance of studying Louisiana dialects also know that close to 60 percent of kindergarteners with and rectifying this situation in the form of a five-year, $1.8 this impairment will present with a reading impairment million grant. in fourth grade. Children with impairments who speak Standard English are identified much younger and much “This project and its results hold theoretical interest to more often. In areas of Louisiana and elsewhere where linguists and psychologists as well as speech-language nontraditional dialects are spoken, the fear is that we’re pathologists—hence the composition of the research missing a lot of children.” team,” said McDonald, interim associate dean of the College of Humanities & Social Sciences and director Worse yet, some children may be considered speech or of Interdisciplinary Programs. “It also has real practical language impaired when in actuality, they happen to implications for the children in Louisiana and elsewhere speak what’s known as a non-standard form of the English who are non-standard dialect speakers.” language. This is especially common in Louisiana. Oetting and her colleagues lead a large team of graduate Standard American English is not a dialect of English, but students from LSU’s Department of Communication rather, a collection of dialects which have high national Sciences & Disorders, Department of Psychology and the visibility, and which, for historical reasons, are widely Interdepartmental Linguistics Program, to study how considered to exemplify American English. Standard the mind handles language and how children acquire American English dialects include ones commonly spoken it, specifically regarding abstract grammar rules, such by middle and upper class Whites in the central and as verb agreement with a subject and the expression of upper Midwest, and in urban areas throughout much of tense. The group focuses on children with SLI, which the Western U.S. Non-standard dialects are ones with refers to children who have no other discernible cognitive pronunciations and/or grammatical features, which are impairment or contributing health factors but who notably different from the standard, for example, the nevertheless lag in the mastery of language, measured speech of people throughout the Southeastern U.S., in against linguistic timetables. In 2010, they began to Brooklyn, or the rural West, and distinctive forms of conduct their field research in Assumption and West African-American speech throughout the country. NonBaton Rouge parishes and by 2014, they hope to have standard dialects are the native or “home” dialects of tens kindergarten data from Iberville and St. James also. of millions of speakers throughout the country, including speakers of all education levels and all racial and ethnic The research is two-pronged: first, the researchers want to groups, even though some learn to employ standard document dialects of Southern Louisiana more fully. American English for business or professional purposes. “There’s not one Southern white dialect, and there’s not just Studies of child language development and of language one African American dialect,” said Oetting. “Every town impairment have most commonly been conducted in we visit has a different, distinct dialect that has similarities northern urban or suburban settings where standard to its neighbors, but also lots of variation within itself.” American English is common, and some have deliberately The second goal is to develop tools essential for measuring focused on standard dialects in order that a single set aspects of language development that are specifically tailored of results might have the widest applicability. This has to Louisiana dialects, language subsets that include African facilitated comparison of results across studies, and it American English, Southern White English, Creole, Cajun has facilitated the development of theoretical tools and and any combination thereof, but before that can be done, methods of empirical investigation in these fields. But the team must clearly identify problems with existing tests. the results obtained in studies of standard dialects do not necessarily apply, or play out in the same way, for the “Right now, we’re working with the Diagnostic Evaluation majority of American speakers who speak a non-standard of Language Variation test, which was created in 2003.