I'm a special ed minor currently in my third special ed class. This one is focused on working with kids with EBD (emotional/behavioral disorders). My professor, Dr. Marlowe, decided to structure the class around the books written by a special ed teacher he wrote a book with called Torey Hayden. The first Torey Hayden book we're reading is called One Child. It is about a six year old girl named Sheila that is temporarily placed in Torey's self-contained classroom until she can be moved to the juvenile ward at the psychiatric hospital. Although Sheila is destructive and disturbed, she is basically a genius. Every time she is given an IQ test, she exceeds the ceiling so neither Torey nor the school psychologists can accurately gauge just how intelligent Sheila is although it's clear she's a prodigy. At six years old, Sheila already reads on a fifth grade level and comprehends vocabulary that even some adults struggle with. As someone studying speech and language disorders, I find it Sheila's speech patterns very interesting. She is a Caucasian female living with her father in a migrant camp but her father is rarely around. She has no running water in the one bedroom shack and only one pair of clothes. She was abandoned on the side of the highway by her mother and is regularly abused by her father. Although Sheila's reading comprehension is off the charts, she speaks in a dialect all her own. At one point Torey speaks with Sheila's father. His speech is typical of someone of a lower SES and education level. Sheila rarely uses the past tense but correctly uses conditionals. "Be" is used instead of "am", "are" or "is" and "do" is inserted in a seemingly random pattern. Torey has had samples of Sheila's speech sent off to be analyzed on multiple occasions but as far as I've read has not received any response.