Language Lessons
Subtle Clues Speak Volumes for Maverick Researcher
An interview with Mabel Rice published by Kansas Alumni, vol. 101, no. 4, 2003.
Gargantuan deadlines loom for Mabel Rice, distinguished professor and eminent scholar. Grant proposals are due to the National Institutes of Health, which funds four of her research projects on child language development. She’s preparing to host an annual summer conference that attracts leading researchers from many disciplines.
But at the moment Rice just can’t say enough about Dora the Explorer, cartoon star of Nickelodeon’s top-rated television show for preschoolers. Rice lights up as she discusses the inflappable 7-year-old Hispanic girl who solves problems, makes friends and even ventures into the City of Lost Toys—all while toting her trusty backpack. Since the program’s inception, Rice has
advised its creators on language use.
“Dora is truly impressive; she’s the first powerful little girl,” Rice says. “She’s a fearless leader and yet she isn’t obnoxious. In fact, she’s very endearing. They have avoided all the negative stereotypes. She is late in coming, of course, but she is the model that everyone would like to have a little girl become.
“She is able to speak up without being outspoken.”
Rice smiles. Enough said. She knows better than to tamper with a well-turned phrase.
Rice loves language. Words are a gift she has treasured since childhood, when she learned to hold her own in a talkative farm family that included Mom, Dad, a sister and four brothers. In high school she competed in debate and dramatic readings.
When she left tiny Menlo, Iowa, for the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, she thought theatre or English literature might be her major. But merely speaking and writing well didn’t quite satisfy her. She wanted to be more than a wordsmith. Curiosity compelled her to examine language in its purest form—the early utterances of young children learning to communicate. Soon
she found another way with words: speech pathology.
“It was a way to understand more about why some of these gifts are provided to some people and not to others,” Rice says, “and how to spread them around so everyone has an opportunity to grow what they need to have.”
So the performer ultimately became a professor. Rice has dedicated her career to understanding language development and its variations. Why do some 5-year-olds say, “He eat pizza” or “I sick yesterday”? Why do some adults struggle with verbs or other aspects of language, and how does it affect their lives? In her search for answers, Rice has become an international authority
on child language development. Her experience as an adviser to the landmark children’s program “Sesame Street” led to her role in the development of Dora, who nimbly switches from English to Spanish as she encourages her young viewers to stretch their vocabularies.
Rice herself is known for solving problems in unusual, adventurous ways. In 1985, she helped launch the innovative Language Acquisition Preschool at KU. She established and still directs the child language doctoral program, which has trained 17 graduates. She helped create the first test to identify a condition known as Specific Language Impairment (SLI), which affects 7 percent of
kindergartners (Down syndrome or autism, far better known than SLI, affect less than 1 percent).
With colleagues in Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska, she has followed more than 400 Kansas children and their families for a decade, monitoring their language development and gathering data to investigate the genetic factors in SLI. With colleagues in Australia, she has launched a new study of twins that over time could yield additional genetic clues.
Rice, PhD’78, this spring became the Fred and Virginia Merrill distinguished professor of advanced studies at KU, thanks to a $1 million endowment from the Merrills of Leawood. As a KU student, Virginia Urban Merrill, ’47, studied with Richard Schiefelbusch, g’47, the KU professor emeritus for whom the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies is named. In 1990 the Leawood
couple founded The Merrill Advanced Studies Center, which Rice directs. As one of 12 centers and clinics within the institute, Merrill conducts research in disabilities and sponsors annual conferences, which Rice hosts, on research practices in higher education.
Rice came to Lawrence in 1974 to earn her doctorate, joining the faculty in 1984. She served as University distinguished professor of speech-language-hearing and ranks among the Hill’s most successful grant winners. She evaluates research nationwide as a member of NIH review panels. Schiefelbusch, her early mentor, says it plainly: “Mabel is our number one success story of all
time.”
Her achievements have grown from a clear and constant motive, says her longtime colleague Kim Wilcox, dean of liberal arts and sciences and professor of speech-language-hearing. “The first thing I think of is Mabel’s sense of service and duty,” he says. “Mabel was a happy person, working as a speech pathologist in Minnesota. But she found that she personally couldn’t do
enough for the kids. She finally came to the conclusion that as a society we didn’t know enough about language. So, as a single parent with a young daughter, she went back to school to get her PhD and learn all she could. It all started with trying to help those kids in Minnesota.”
When Rice and Wilcox landed on the KU faculty the same year in the same department, they soon found they shared the same frustrations with the conventional model of speech pathology—working one-on-one with struggling children. “When you single out a child for instruction, the first thing everyone else in the class knows is there’s something different about that child,” Wilcox
says. “The standard practices just weren’t ver y appealing to children or fun for them. If it wasn’t fun for the kids and it didn’t make sense to the parents, it probably wasn’t a very good option.”
It also wasn’t the best way to train new speech pathologists, Rice adds. “They only came to know one child at a time, and they didn’t have opportunities to see how children behave in groups or to learn how typically developing children progressed and how this language system emerges, because they were working only with youngsters who were struggling so much.”
So the two created the Language Acquisition Preschool, where one-third of the children were affected by language impairment, one-third had no impairment, and the final third were learning English as a second language. With an initial $100,000 grant, the two began teaching classes in 1985. Two decades later, the preschool is affiliated with the Lawrence public schools and receives
funding from the school district, the University and federal agencies. “We’re very proud that it’s a communitybased delivery system that is woven in,” Rice says. “It has survived all he different fads that come and go.”
The preschool’s endurance proves the principle that children can successfully teach one another. “It just takes one child saying to another, ‘Why do you say it like that?’ and bam! The light goes on,” Rice says. “That lesson sticks and it is recalled. Adults can talk forever and it doesn’t have that kind of impact.”
Subtle language clues, whether in children’s chatter or adult conversation, speak volumes to Rice. Through years of listening to children and adults, she and other scholars pinpointed certain grammatical indicators of SLI. Most telling is the use of verbs. Does a child drop the –s from the end of present tense verbs? Are forms of “to be” and “do” misused? According to
Rice’s research, correct sentence structure can baffle SLI children, who strain to express themselves and understand others clearly. Many SLI children sound about two years younger than their age—a critical lag because when it comes to learning language, timing is everything.
“These youngsters are typically late getting started,” she says. “The actual rate at which they change is surprisingly similar to other kids, but they don’t change that rate, which means they never catch up. So the other children who started earlier stay at a higher level and keep going at a higher level.”
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To identify SLI children and provide treatment early on, Rice and Kenneth Wexler, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2001 introduced the Rice/Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment. It is the first comprehensive test to help speech pathologists and preschool teachers accurately diagnose SLI in children ges 3 to 8.
Parts of the test are incorporated into Rice’s long-term research of more than 400 Kansas families. The children in this group, age preschool to 14, are evaluated every six months; family members of each new child in the study are also screened, and those who are affected by SLI are included in the study. To participate, children must come from monolingual homes, have no autism or
neurological disabilities, and they must not leave the consonants off the ends of their words. These requirements help distinguish potential SLI children from those with speech impediments or other impairments.
Thus far, Rice says, the study has found that when one child has SLI, 25 to 30 percent of nuclear family members also are affected. In parents, Rice sees the long-term impact. “There’s something sort of mortifying about it to an adult,” she says. “It’s a difficult limitation for people to talk about, because it’s not widely understood. We get it all confused with not being
a good student or not trying hard enough or not being very smart. It’s none of those.”
The experiences of two fathers illustrate the range of SLI—and the skills to cope with the condition. Even Rice did not easily identify the first father as having SLI. “One of my colleagues is a very accomplished professor. He once heard me talking about this and said, ‘You know, I’m one of your people. And furthermore, my daughter is too,’” she recalls. “We certainly
have families like that who are very bright but for whom language is a difficult area.”
The second father, who has participated in the decade-long Kansas study, is a manager at a McDonald’s restaurant, Rice says. “He listens to the testing items, and he says, ‘I know what you’re doing here. I know some of the sentences are good and some are bad, but I’ll be darned if I know which is which.’”
Adults and children in the Kansas study listen to sentences spoken by the examiners, who are dispatched to many parts of the state in three specially equipped vans, featuring audio and video recording equipment, a desk and chairs, and toys to use during sessions with children.
On one hot May afternoon, examiner Amy Kepler has driven to a small Johnson County town to test 5-year-old Taylor, who is itching to finish her session, collect her toy rewards, and put on her swimsuit for water play with her kindergarten classmates. Kepler introduces a segment of the test using 2-inch plastic robot figures, neon pink and green. “They have come to earth to learn
English, and sometimes they forget how to say the little parts. Can you help them?” she asks Taylor. She follows with a rapid succession of sentences: “I likes hamburger. He drinks milk. He are spitting it out.” Taylor identifies which are right and which are “not so good.”
Using these questions and other exercises, the team each semester assesses 100 children and adults representing 70 families. Rice hopes renewed NIH grant money could buy additional vans and upgrade the equipment to incorporate laptop computers. The team plans to add 25 new children each semester, thanks to partnerships with speech pathologists in Hutchinson, Wichita and Topeka.
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In addition to refining testing methods, the Kansas study contributes genetic data for the study of inherited factors in language development. Samples (in the form of cotton swabs from the inside of subjects’ mouths) go to Jeff Murray of the University of Iowa and Shelley Smith at the University of Nebraska Medical Center at Omaha. Murray specializes in molecular genetics, examining
specific portions of DNA. Smith analyzes statistics involving genetic variations.
Another of Rice’s projects, a five-year study of twins in Australia, is just completing its first year. Though far removed geographically, Australia is an ideal test site for two reasons, Rice explains. First, large numbers of twins and single-born children already have participated in a national study of overall health, providing thorough early health history for comparing the pace
of language development in twins vs. single-born children. Second, the connection between Australia and the American Midwest is surprisingl y strong. “Perth, Australia, is almost identical demographically to Kansas City,” Rice says. “The city is about 2 million people, and the ethnicity and income distributions are very similar.”
Genetic research of language development is relatively new, only 5 to 10 years old, Rice says. Studies typically span several years and offer tantalizing yet tenuous promise. Even admirably patient adults fidget like 5-year-olds at the prospect of waiting for answers.
But wait we must, Rice cautions. “We’re beginning to believe that multiple genes are involved and that they interact with one another. There’s something going on that has to do with the timing of language acquisition—when it begins and the rate at which it follows. … The breakthroughs have come quite suddenly, and we’re beginning to find out more at least by ruling things
out.”
The gift of language is only one of the many mysteries of development. The rates at which a child learns words, takes steps, loses baby teeth or grows taller are all timed according to inherited schedules. To help those for whom the words won’t come, Mabel Rice patiently asks new questions, listening carefully for more clues. “These processes are everywhere,” she says, and in
many cases we have no idea what triggers them.
“It’s all so elegant.”
Well said, Mabel. Well said.
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To learn more about Specific Language Impairment (SLI),visit In the Know, a public outreach project of the Merrill Advanced Studies Center, at www.merrill.ku.edu. It explains the latest science on disabilities, aging and human development.In the Know also summarizes topics from recent Merrill conferences and shares findings from the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies, the largest research center at KU.
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