Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, The Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. Although the title of this April 1976 Classic article may imply a story about a woman’s shady gambling tactics, it actually reveals a language specialist’s novel way of diagnosing and correcting children’s faulty speaking habits, one card at a time.
No one would guess that trim, earnest Dr. Madalene Barnett, a respected member of the Baylor faculty for seven years, cheats at cards.
And she cheats children.
She cheats so the child can win. When the child wins, Dr. Barnett wins: her prize is attention; the child’s is expression.
Dr. Barnett’s game is “Fish,” but the cards, which she uses to help children with speech problems, are not the usual kind.
A child playing “Fish” with Dr. Barnett matches sets of cards that go together and, to do that, he must vocalize. One set of cards helps drill plurals. For example, he must match a card picturing a tooth with a card picturing several teeth.
Dr. Barnett varies the sets of cards according to the child’s particular speech problem, but the constant factor is the child’s having to ask aloud for the card he wants.
When she stacks the cards, it is because the child’s attention is drifting from losing too many hands.
Dr. Barnett’s willingness to go to such lengths to help the children in Baylor’s Speech, Hearing and Language Center has held to the development of a deceptively simple test that could advance language therapy internationally.
A language specialist and professor of oral communication, Dr. Barnett began formulating what she calls the “Say What I Say” test in 1971. The catalyst was a seven-year-old named Debbie who could not ask a question.
As she worked with Debbie, “I kept finding things she couldn’t do,” Dr. Barnett said.
Debbie was unable to deal with plurals, to generalize, to make a declarative sentence into a question. She could not put words in their proper order in a sentence.
Besides Debbie, another child is linked in Dr. Barnett’s mind to “Say What I Say.” She lost her hearing at age two and missed out on vocabulary, but her sentence structure was good.
The valuable simultaneous evaluation of these two children and readings in her field prompted Dr. Barnett to engage the help of her graduate students in preparing the “ Say What I Say” test.
Prior to the formulation of the test, language therapy was done on what Dr. Barnett calls a “search and destroy” basis: language specialists would begin therapy, discovering a child’s problems as they went along and altering therapy to fit these problems.
The aim of the “Say What I Say” test is to discover a child’s language problems first, through testing. Then therapy is begun, based on these findings. The goal is for a child to say a complete sentence.
Language specialist Madalene Barnett’s ‘Say What I Say’ test has brought her international recognition.
The testing idea had been written about on a theoretical level, but nothing had been done about it except some small studies.
“The idea was not original with me,” Dr. Barnett said. “Doing it was original.”
The test is based on repetition of sentences that range from the simple to the difficult. The person administering the test says a sentence and asks the child to repeat it. Scores are based on accurate repetition, and they single out specific problems a child has with individual parts of speech in each sentence.
The test is designed primarily for children ages three through seven.
Dr. Barnett said it is not likely a parent would notice a young child’s language problems. Intonation, for example, tells a parent that the child is asking a question, and the parent may not notice that the child cannot use the question form of a sentence.
Dr. Barnett said a child, as he progresses, will form questions in the following ways:
“Daddy?”
“Where Daddy?”
“Where Daddy go?”
“Where Daddy going?”
“Where is Daddy going?”
“By age three and one-half to four a child should have the sentence organization of our language established,” Dr. Barnett said. “I’m talking about basic organization, not the refinements such as past tense.”
Although she says she can’t prove it, Dr. Barnett believes “the use of language is just as much an innate part of a child as walking. We do not teach a child to walk. They’ll walk when they’re ready; it’s the same with talking.
“A child who doesn’t talk at a level considered normal for his developmental age apparently has a breakdown some place in the neurological structure of the brain,” Dr. Barnett said. Her job as a therapist is to circumvent this breakdown.
Although she believes a child learns language organization on his own, “the refinements are up to the people around him.” For example, a child must have help in choosing the proper tense, Dr. Barnett said. Irregular past tenses and plurals must be reinforced, she said, or the child will continue saying “thinked” and “swimmed.”
The proper way to help a child is “not to bug him,” she said, but to repeat his incorrect sentence, correctly.
If a child says, “I digged a hole,” the parent should respond with a sentence similar to “Yes, you dug a big hole.”
Dr. Barnett is opposed to parental use of baby talk.
“A child is entitled to use baby talk, but not an adult. That’s what a child is capable of doing; an adult is capable of doing much more and should present a correct model,” she said.
Although the “Say What I Say” test is completed, Dr. Barnett’s research is not over. She is still collecting normative data for three- and four-year-olds. Graduate students are attempting to evaluate the role auditory memory plays in sentence repetition.
Dr. Barnett presented “Say What I Say” to the International Conference of Joint Council for the Education of Handicapped Children at Kent University, Canterbury, England, in August. She was one of six Americans on the program. The test was also presented at the Texas Speech and Hearing Association meeting in Galveston in October.
She said her paper explaining the test was very well received in England, and she has had many orders for copies of the test.
“They’re going to use it,” Dr. Barnett said. “It’s not something to put on the shelf”.
Dr. Barnett came to Baylor after a year of postdoctoral work at the Houston Speech and Hearing Center. Her B.S. in education is from Indiana State Teachers College in Pennsylvania and her M.A. and Ph.D. are from Ohio University, Athens, Ohio.
