UC speech-language researcher awarded NIH grant

The University of Cincinnati received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the speech of bilingual children who speak English and Jamaican Creole.

Karla Washington, director of the Pediatric Language, Literacy & Speech Outcomes Lab and associate professor in UC's College of Allied Health Sciences wants to explore accuracy and variability in the children's speech.

The two-year grant, sponsored by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, recognizes the innovative nature of Washington’s research, which expands knowledge of an understudied population and which, more broadly, is helping to validate theoretical models and practical tools for speech-language pathologists to assess speech development in multilingual children. These will have a real-world impact on care decisions for children and on care management decisions by school systems that serve multicultural communities.

Translational science like Washington’s showcases the University of Cincinnati’s strengths as a top-tier research university and exemplifies the Next Lives Here strategic values of innovation, impact, and inclusion.

Washington’s work also highlights UC’s commitment to experiential learning. Each year, she leads a study-abroad program to Jamaica with graduate students, undergrads and alumni in her international data collection. The program is an example of the innovative experiential learning opportunities that UC provides to prepare students for the global workplace.  

“The long-term goal of this research is to understand how speech production development differs in bilingual and multilingual versus monolingual learners,” Washington said.

Children in Jamaica function in a complex language environment. At home, most speak Jamaican Creole, the country’s dominant language, which developed from English and the West African languages spoken by the island’s diverse populations in the colonial and slavery period of its history.

At school, most use English, since Jamaica is a British Commonwealth country. They study British government, history and culture.

The children learn to “code-switch” between Jamaican Creole and British English with different speakers. Popular movies, TV and music introduce them to American English, with a third set of cultural and situational associations.

Documenting the speech development of preschoolers in this multilingual society offers theorists and practitioners insights about what is typical speech development, what is disordered and what is merely different but not disordered.

“That moment resonated with me,” she says. “I recall thinking that I needed to conduct research to document the profile of the Jamaican Creole– and English–speaking preschooler so that clinicians everywhere would be informed about speech and language communication forms for this population.”

In 2017, the US was home to some three-quarters of a million Jamaican-born people, the third-largest group of Caribbean immigrants, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Washington has published a series of peer-reviewed papers documenting the speech and language of Jamaican preschoolers and verifying for Jamaican Creole bilingual speakers the precision of standard SLP tools that were developed with monolingual or other bilingual populations.

Her NIH-funded project will build on that work. It focuses specifically on accuracy and variability in the children’s speech. Jamaican Creole offers many ways to say the same thing, and children may respond differently when asked the same question over a short period of time.

“We’ve been taught, traditionally, that that variability or that inconsistency in speech production is a red flag,” Washington says. “But with these kids, that variability is not indicative of disorder.”

Cultural differences may also affect the children’s answers. “Instead of saying ‘clock,’ they might say ‘watch.’ Now, it’s a different lexical representation. A watch you wear on your wrist and a clock is on the wall. But for some Jamaican kids, it’s more of a gestalt—it’s a timepiece—rather than being so specific in terms of the output.

“We’re going to document, statistically, what’s typical variability and what’s disordered variability.”

Tara McAllister, at New York University, is Washington’s co-investigator. She will facilitate the analysis of the data using her theoretical model the Articulatory map (A-map) that considers variability in speech production.

Sarah Hamilton Dugan, who went on the 2014 trip and got her doctorate from the SLP program in 2016, says her experience was invaluable as she began to focus her own doctoral research and when she later became involved in managing two NIH-funded projects herself. Her current project is to develop a videogame in which children use biofeedback to improve their speech motor control.

“Karla’s work is a very clear example of translational science, translating things from principle to practice," Dugan said. "My background ultimately is in linguistics, which is a very basic-science kind of discipline. But I got into speech-language pathology because I wanted to see how that basic science could impact real life.

“I would say that this was one of the top experiential learning experiences that I have ever had, because it was fully immersive. I was in a foreign country doing the data collection there, managing it, sort of figuring out how to coordinate all the equipment and the people. But it was in a guided format, so I wasn’t on my own. It’s good to have some guard rails.”

Washington works at the university level to support global education as well. She serves for her college in the UC International strategy group for the Middle East and North Africa, one of seven advisory groups that held guide UC in building university-wide partnerships around the world. These comprehensive partnerships offer opportunities to students and foster international collaborations among faculty. Currently, UC has 11 strategic partners.

“The MENA group helps to liaise between UC and potential partners so that each other's cultural background and practices will facilitate partnership development rather than be a barrier,” she says. “Strategic partnerships like this are key for our students’ global education.”

Featured image: Washington stands in front of the new Health Sciences Building that houses the College of Allied Health Sciences.