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This tool was designed to assess children who speak a wide range of dialects but it wasn’t field tested with a large number of Louisiana children,” said Oetting. “We are putting it through its paces to see if it’s flagging or missing those children with documented clinical speech and language impairments.” What they’re finding is consistent with the original concern—the test is not sensitive to the variety of dialects found in South Louisiana and therefore the accuracy of this test is not as good as the normative data suggests. “It isn’t sensitive to the many dialects our children produce because it only offers three different dialect categories and it isn’t as sensitive to impairment as we would like it to be because it is over-classifying children as impaired.” said Oetting. “We’d like to increase the dialect levels to at least five and change some of the items to better reflect the grammar structures of our dialects. At its current level, it’s simply not detailed enough to be beneficial in areas that have a high level of dialect variation.” Oetting and colleagues are grateful for the support they have received from the public schools. They have been welcomed into schools with open arms, spending the first year after receiving NIH support testing their stimuli and their second year collecting one-fourth of their projected data. “Children also love our experiments because we use laptops with videos of adults, children, and a large number of puppets.” “Language researchers from all over are constantly surprised at the amount of data we at LSU are able to collect from the residents of our state,” said Oetting. “But that’s because of the immense pride people here have in their Louisiana culture. They’re proud of their languages, and rightfully so.” In fact, more than 76 percent of parents signed consent forms to allow their children to participate in the study in 2010; in other parts of the country, rate of consent form return can be as low as 30 percent. With data from 115 children collected in 2010, they are set to meet their target of 300 children ahead of schedule. So far, their work confirms that grammar measures need to be a part of testing; however, these markers need to be customized to reflect the children’s Louisiana dialects. One interesting identifier they have been able to consistently report is known as the “Zero BE,” the result of
omitting occurrences of BE used as an auxiliary or linking verb. This structure is sometimes omitted in a range of Louisiana dialects; however, omission isn’t random. While “is” and “are” forms are omitted in up to 80 percent of nonstandard dialects, “am, was and were” are almost never left out. Therefore, when a kindergartener doesn’t produce “am, was, and were” that is one sign they can use to rule in a language impairment for that child. Of course, additional testing is needed to confirm a diagnosis, but a child’s nonuse of some forms of BE can be telling. Another interesting discovery they have made is that children speaking various Louisiana dialects add and omit certain grammar structures. This reflects a highly productive and creative use of what some might consider improper English, making statements such as “I knows about that,” or “I cookeded the food.” However, children with impairments primarily omit grammar structures, as in, “Yesterday, I cook.” This is in large part because typically developing dialect-speaking students have strong language systems to draw from, so their creativity is based in part on their strong language abilities. Children with impairments simply don’t have the language abilities to produce a high number of innovative and complex grammar expressions. “We need our test to recognize that children who speak in these Louisiana dialects produce ‘am/was/were’ at different rates than ‘is’ and ‘are.’ So, in this state, we need to target all five of the ‘be’ forms,” said Oetting. “In so-called standard English dialect testing, we might only need a small sample of the ‘be’ forms because in that dialect, children produce ‘am, are’ and ‘is’ at similar rates.” However, although the literature led clinicians to believe that their current tools might be inappropriate for dealing with Louisiana dialects, Oetting’s data is showing that this isn’t completely true. “Right now, what we’re seeing is that some of our tools and existing tests can be modified and, more importantly, it looks like we can use a combination of tools and mathematical models to develop empirically-derived combinations of tools and clinical cut-offs for these tools to identify children with impairment,” she said. “We are learning many things,” said Oetting. “Some grammar omissions seem to be tied to the cultural origin. For instance, in some areas such as Pierre Part where Cajun English is commonly spoken, the word ‘to’ is