Section Four
Module 14: Beliefs, Behaviors, and Stories About Culture, Language, and Identity in Speech-Language Pathology
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Which stories about culture, language, and identity allow which behaviors, for speech-language pathologists in the U.S.?
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After working with the material in this module, readers will be able to
describe
Module 14 uses two interpretations of selected information to tell two competing stories about our profession’s culture and about our profession’s approaches to people’s cultures. What stories do you tell, about your profession and about your actions as a professional?
Among the greatest dangers inherent in attempting to describe any culture are both the Columns and Rows problem and the related out-group homogeneity bias (Park & Rothbart, 1982). We see things from the vantage points that we have. We can try to be aware of our vantage points, work hard to understand other vantage points, and do our best to respect other vantage points. Still, in the end, we are each taking the single journey through life that we are taking.
How, then, can we finalize Section Four’s discussion of something as diffuse as our entire profession’s history, underlying assumptions, and culture?
One partial solution, as we have mentioned in several other places throughout this website, is to be aware of the fallacies and biases that characterize human thinking and to actively use the tools of critical thinking to at least attempt to counteract those biases (for examples in speech-language pathology in particular, see Finn, 2011; Finn et al., 2016; Thome et al. 2025). Let’s try, therefore, to seek and interpret evidence from multiple directions, or, in this case, to tell two distinctly different and competing stories about our profession’s “culture about culture” — and then to think about your stories and think about the influence of our stories on our actions.
Story #1: Speech-Language Pathology’s Culture About Culture Has Been Improving For a Long Time and Has Some Impressive Bright Spots (A Distinctly Optimistic Story in Four Parts)
Part One: Researchers Have Focused for Decades Now on Developing Methods For Addressing All Clients’ Needs Appropriately
The publication patterns we analyzed in Module 13 are undeniable, but the problems they reflect are in the past and have been solved. Since the early 1970s, approaching 60 years ago now, researchers and other authors have recognized that our profession’s speech and language services must take dialect and clients’ other cultural and identity variables into account.
In one early example of the awareness that our profession needed and has gained, Drumwright et al. (1973) wrote that many standardized measures of articulation existed at the time, “the majority of which were constructed with white, middle-class children who spoke standard American English” (Drumwright, 1973, p. 4). To help address everyone else’s needs, Drumwright et al. (1973) developed and validated an articulation screening instrument that used only those phonemes and word positions that were produced by typically developing children from White, Black, and Mexican American backgrounds (e.g., their final test did not use /θ/ in the final position, so as not to penalize children whose dialects may produce words such as “bath” with the phoneme /f/). This approach, known as testing only for “non-contrastive” features of the dialects, was widely recommended by the 1980s (e.g., Seymour, 1986), including in an important textbook about cultural issues for speech-language pathology (Taylor, 1986; see also Seymour et al., 1998, for a later explanation and study).
The original Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT; Dunn, 1959), similarly, was widely used (Stark, 1971) but was known by the early 1970s to result in lower scores for Black children than for White children of the same socio-economic background (Kresheck & Nicolosi, 1973). Multiple researchers worked hard to understand the racial, ethnic, social, economic, and other cultural variables that influence scores on the PPVT, its later versions, and related tests (e.g., Meline, 1981; Uhl et al., 1972; see Restrepo et al., 2006, for one comprehensive summary of the issues).
Beyond the limited issue of testing, many other researchers were also organizing their work by the early 1970s around the (rather obvious) point that individuals’ social and linguistic backgrounds affect their language use, literacy development, social communication patterns, and other broader issues. Labov’s (1972) now-classic masterwork Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular summarized extensive socio-linguistic and educational research that he and his colleagues had been conducting since 1965. Many of the conclusions Labov emphasized, and his supporting data, established several points that quickly became central to both linguistics and speech-language pathology (and, again, have now directed our field’s work for close to 60 years).
1. The Black American Englishes, and Black English Vernacular in particular, are complete, rule-governed dialects of English that deserve to be treated with as much scientific rigor and respect as any other dialects of English.
2. The use of any dialect is an issue of social communication. Our dialects reflect and sustain our social relationships, our communities, and each. individual’s sense of belonging in those relationships and communities.
3. Many formal measures of literacy development and educational achievement tend to be low for speakers of the Black Englishes in the U.S., an outcome that needs to be understood in context. Parts of the problem, clearly, must be attributed to the measures themselves. Other parts can be attributed to differences between speakers’ native dialects and the dialects that tend to be expected in written academic English. And parts of the problem must also be attributed to what Labov referred to, quite starkly, as the “ignorance” (see especially his Chapter 1) of educational professionals about the relationships between Black Vernacular English and written academic English and about appropriate methods for teaching children who speak the former to read and write the latter.
Within speech-language pathology, Seymour (1977) added a fourth basic conclusion and recommendation that, at many levels, must also be obvious: children’s developing speech and language abilities must be judged against the adult standard for the dialect they are learning (see Seymour’s 1977 original explanation), not judged against the standards of a language or a dialect they have not been exposed to and do not know. By 1979, Evard and Sabers (1979) could summarize multiple methods for improving the validity of speech and language test scores for clients from different dialect, ethnic, or racial groups: modify test items, develop new norms for an existing test, or develop a new test.
During the 1980s, multiple researchers with expertise in multiple languages and dialects continued to add to our profession’s understanding. This era included expansive work in Spanish-English bilingualism (by Gutiérrez-Clellen, Peña, and others), the African American English dialects (by Craig, Washington, and others), and other languages and dialects. By the 1990s, expanding generations of researchers had added their expertise (see the work of Restrepo, Oetting, Hyter, B. Yu, and others); well-established linguists were publishing in ASHA journals (see Wolfram, 1997, explaining the Ebonics controversies from the Oakland, CA, school districts); and specific recommendations for clinical targets (and, importantly, non-targets) were available in ASHA journals for clients who speak a range of languages, including Cantonese. By 1998, Yavas and Goldstein (1998) could use this extensive research base as the support for their specific clinical recommendations, which addressed the needs of children who spoke Turkish, Mandarin, and Swedish, in addition to Spanish.
In short, at this point in our history, many of our profession’s undeniable original problems are history.
Part Two: We Have Been Reflecting, Recommending, and Requiring for Over 50 Years
Other parts of our success story are evident in many other clinical and professional areas. As Higby et al. (2024) recently summarized, ASHA created its first Office of “Urban and Ethnic Affairs” (now our active Office of Multicultural Affairs) in 1969. ASHA recommended cultural competency education for graduate programs in 1985, and ASHA certification requirements have included cultural competency for over 20 years (since 2004 for academic standards and since 2005 for clinical standards).
Similarly, the newsletter that became Perspectives on Communication Disorders and Sciences in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD) Populations was started in 1995 and has been available through ASHA since 1997. That first 1997 issue – almost 30 years ago – addressed the needs of bilingual (Anderson, 1997a; Patterson, 1997), Spanish-speaking (Restrepo, 1997), and internationally-adopted (Pearson, 1997) children, in addition to providing specific practical information about code switching (Brice, 1997) and bilingual internet resources (Anderson, 1997b).
A decade later, Deal-Williams (2009) wrote about “ASHA’s accomplishments in the multicultural arena,” which she described as including “the entire national office, the work of ASHA committees, boards, councils, and special interest divisions, and work with related professional organizations.” Even as long ago as 2009, she could describe our profession as able to “look back” at the changes and successes that “allowed us to implement the components required to foster diversity and inclusion.”
This era of reflection, around 2010, was also characterized by our profession’s growing awareness that responding appropriately to culture, language, and identity is never finished but must include continuing to recognize ongoing and newly emerging issues. This was the era when notions such as “achieving cultural competence” were replaced by expanded, second-order recognition of the continual and dynamic complexities raised by culture, language, identity, history, and society. A 2013 special issue of Perspectives, as one of many examples, addressed the notion of “White privilege,” which had become a popular notion in general media at the time (Kohnert, 2013; McIntosh, 1988), including presenting some relatively specific information about how to teach about white privilege in our field (Preis, 2013).
In these examples and many other ways, our field has been actively incorporating an awareness of culture, language, and identity into all aspects of our profession for decades. Currently, of the 305 master’s programs listed on ASHA’s EdFind service, 64 advertise a multi-cultural emphasis, 52 describe themselves as “Hispanic serving” institutions, and 51 describe themselves as providing emphases in bilingual speech-language pathology.
Regardless of where our field might have started, that’s a lot of programs, preparing a lot of well-informed speech-language pathologists.