Janna Oetting

Professor Louisiana State University

  • Baton Rouge LA

Dr. Oetting works to reduce disparities in health and education among children.

Contact

Louisiana State University

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Biography

Janna is a professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and the Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics. She also directs the D4 Child Language Lab, which supports research on language Development and Disorders across Dialects of English to reduce Disparities in health and education among children. Her work has been funded by numerous agencies, including the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, LA Department of Health, and the American Speech Language Hearing Foundation. She also has helped secure funding for graduate students from the National Institutes of Health, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation, and the Southern Regional Education Board, and she has served as a mentor to undergraduate students as part of various programs. Janna is a Fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and has served as Editor and Associated Editor of Language for the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. She is also a Fellow of the Louisiana Speech-Language-Hearing Association and served as Vice President and President of this organization in 2001 and 2002.

Areas of Expertise

Child Language Development
Language Development
Dialect Disorders
Health Disparities
Early Intervention

Research Focus

Child Language Development & Dialect Disorders

Dr. Oetting’s research focuses on child language development and disorders across dialects of English, aiming to reduce health and educational disparities. She combines cross-dialectal corpus analysis, clinical language sampling, and developmental assessments through LSU’s D4 Child Language Lab to refine diagnosis and intervention tools for children who speak non-mainstream dialects.

Education

University of Kansas

Ph.D.

Child Language

1992

University of Kansas

M.A.

Speech-Language Pathology

1988

Augustana College

B.A.

Speech-Language Pathology

1986

Accomplishments

Editor’s Award for the Language Article of Highest Merit; Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research

2019

Tiger Athletic Foundation Undergraduate Teaching Award

2013

Articles

Predictors of sentence recall performance in children with and without DLD: Complexity matters

Journal of Child Language

2024

Using archival data from 106 children with and without DLD who spoke two dialects of English, we examined the independent contributions of vocabulary, morphological ability, phonological short term memory (pSTM), and verbal working memory (WM) to exact sentence recall, ungrammatical repetition, and incorrect tense production. For exact repetitions on simpler sentences, performance of the DLD group was predicted by morphological ability, pSTM and WM, while that of the TD group was predicted by vocabulary and sometimes pSTM. On complex sentences, performance of the DLD group was predicted by morphological ability, and the TD group was predicted by pSTM and WM.

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Transcription decisions of conjoined independent clauses are equitable across dialects but impact measurement outcomes

Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools

2024

Transcription of conjoined independent clauses within language samples varies across professionals. Some transcribe these clauses as two separate utterances, whereas others conjoin them within a single utterance. As an inquiry into equitable practice, we examined rates of conjoined independent clauses produced by children and the impact of separating these clauses within utterances on measures of mean length of utterance (MLU) by a child's English dialect, clinical status, and age.

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Acceptability of Racial Microaggressions From the Perspective of Speech-Language Pathology Students

Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools

2024

Implicit racial and ethnic biases have been documented across a variety of allied health professions; however, minimal research on this topic has been conducted within the field of speech-language pathology. The purpose of this study was to understand implicit racial and ethnic bias in speech-language pathology students by examining their perceptions and attitudes about the acceptability of racial and ethnic microaggressions. We also examined whether the student ratings varied by their racial and ethnic identity (White vs. people of color [POC]).

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Affiliations

  • American Association for the Advancement of Science
  • National Association of Black Speech, Language, and Hearing
  • Linguistic Society of America
  • Council for Exceptional Children
  • International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association
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Event Appearances

Maternal use of integrase strand inhibitors and infant neurodevelopment

2025 | International Workshop on HIV Observational Databases  Toledo, Spain

A comparison of two screeners for Head Start children

2025 | National Black Association for Speech-Language and Hearing Convention  Long Beach, CA

Exploring nonword repetition for Farsi and Farsi/English-speaking children using a quasi-universal task

2024 | Symposium for Research in Child Language Disorders  Madison, WI

Research Grants

Supplemental training grant to mentor minority researchers

National Institutes on Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders (RSA

2011-2014

Media

Social