Abridged summary of info-childes at googlegroups.com - 1 Message in 1 Topic

[Tom Roeper]

Dear Ana and Ginny--

There is another important dimension to all of this.  It is a concern of
mine that the relevance
of language acquistion to linguistic theory be fully appeciated and
grasped.  How often does
one read in a theoretical paper that a phenomenon is found in language
family X, Y, Z and
in child grammar?  Extremely rarely, but in many respects spontaneous
acquisition behavior
for instance copying (can I can come) should be seen as much more
persuasive than very
indirect theoretical arguments for say, copying.  Yet in general, simple
confirmation of
ideas through acquisition references is sorely lacking.
    This is also a reflection of the fact that language acquisition has a
large number of women
in it I suspect, and gender bias is playing a role.   This is not entirely
without overt evidence---
but I remember a male colleague saying---many many years ago--"language
acquisition is
for women".  By the way, I also heard, within linguistic theory itself
remarks like "morphology
is for women", but not recently.

Tom Roeper


On Sun, Aug 18, 2013 at 7:16 AM, Virginia Valian <vvvstudents at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear Anna,
>
> I'd like to start by reiterating that I think this year's speakers will be
> excellent!  I look forward to hearing them on 31 October.
>
> I appreciate seeing the whole list of SLD symposium speakers.  It's good
> to see that the history has a better proportion of women overall than this
> year alone would suggest.  Note, though, that language acquisition is a
> primarily female field.  If all other things are equal - and they may not
> be - we would expect to see primarily female speakers over the long haul.
>  That is, in the case of language acquisition, we don't expect 50-50 but
> many more women, just as, in fields that are male-dominated, we don't
> expect 50-50, but many more men.
>
> Who receives public attention affects not only the particular women whose
> voices aren't heard, but all students and researchers in the field.
> People's aspirations, interests, and expectations are affected by who they
> see in prestigious positions.
>
> As the links I provided earlier spell out in more detail - and see my
> gender tutorial 4, www.hunter.cuny.edu/gendertutorial/slides/gt04.htm -
> the social-cognitive analysis that I provide shows why everyone - male and
> female alike, and that includes me - is likely to find men's names to be
> more cognitively available than women's.  We all have gender schemas and we
> all use cognitive heuristics.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> VVV
>
> Virginia Valian
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Tom Roeper
Dept of Lingiustics
UMass South College
Amherst, Mass. 01003 ISA
413 256 0390

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