Janna Oetting
Professor Louisiana State University
- Baton Rouge LA
Dr. Oetting works to reduce disparities in health and education among children.
Areas of Expertise
Biography
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
Tiger Athletic Foundation Undergraduate Teaching Award
2013
Editor’s Award for the Language Article of Highest Merit; Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
2019
Articles
Grammaticality Judgments of tense and agreement by children with and without developmental language disorder across dialects of English
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research2023
Within General American English (GAE), the grammar weaknesses of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have been documented with many tasks, including grammaticality judgments. Recently, Vaughn et al. replicated this finding with a judgment task targeting tense and agreement (T/A) structures for children who spoke African American English (AAE), a dialect that contains a greater variety of T/A forms than GAE. In the current study, we further tested this finding for children who spoke Southern White English (SWE), another dialect that contains a greater variety of T/A forms than GAE but less variety than AAE. Then, combining the SWE and AAE data, we explored the effects of a child's dialect, clinical group, and production of T/A forms on the children's judgments.
Models of Variable Form Acquisition Should Be Informed by Cross-Dialect Studies of Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)
Language Learning and Development2024
Shin and Mill (2021) propose four steps children go through when learning variable form use. Although I applaud Shin and Miller’s focus on morphosyntactic variation, their accrual of evidence is post hoc and selective. Fortunately, Shin and Miller recognize this and encourage tests of their ideas. In support of their work, I share data from children with and without DLD within AAE and SWE to promote these child profiles and dialectal varieties in future studies.
Transcription decisions of conjoined independent clauses are equitable across dialects but impact measurement outcomes
Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools2024
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.
Predictors of sentence recall performance in children with and without DLD: Complexity matters
Journal of Child Language2024
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.
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
- Louisiana Speech-Language-Hearing Association
- nternational Association for the Study of Child Language
- Sigma Xi, Scientific Research Society
- Society for Research in Child Development
- American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
- Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society
- Omicron Delta Kappa National Honor Society
Research Grants
Supplemental training grant to mentor minority researchers
National Institutes on Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders (RSA
2011-2014
Media
