I'm NOT Impaired, I just Speak Like This!

Dialect is is variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. This phenomenon can be geographic or social, but until now there’s no important research about testing it versus standard language, which leads to a failure in the educational system when it comes to testing children with language impairments.

Since there is no meaningful research in the field yet, children who come with dialects from home are often misdiagnosed with language impairments and sent to speech pathologists. On the other hand children who do have speech impairment go unidentified because they are thought to have a dialect. Further research in this field may avoid this situation by creating more tests that can be applied to kids who speak dialects.

Until now there are only standardized tests, this means that many children are misdiagnosed; some of them have language impairments, but are misdiagnosed because they can communicate effectively, others don’t suffer from this conditions, but are misdiagnosed because they speak dialect. Thus, it’s fundamental to develop tests that can be applied to children with different social backgrounds and different geographical origins.

More importantly, it is indispensable to conduct meaningful research to identify and distinguish the different dialects present in our country, a work that has been unfulfilled until now. There are few studies that explain, expose or account for different dialects in Chile and none that has ever attempted to achieve identification and/or a description of some or all of them. If you run a search on Chilean dialects the results will always be about accents (which is not the same) or southern and northern variables, which are only two of the dialects that can be found in the whole extensity of our country; furthermore, Chilean dialect-- which has been defined as a variable of Spanish language—has been defined by the standard, leaving out and ignoring all the possible dialects that can be present in the south and in the north, without even defining what is the definition of “standardized Chilean dialect”.

Here I leave you a link to some news about this research field, it's about an american researcher and you will find out that the lack of research about this matter is not only a chilian problem:

http://www.lsureveille.com/news/article_ab2da42a-02db-11e2-9271-0019bb30f31a.html

And here it is the search that I ran to find some scientific articles aboutthe topic, you can see that there's barely some information about very specific dialects:

http://scholar.google.cl/scholar?hl=en&q=dialectos+chilenos&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=