The Nine Lives of "Linguistic Deficiency"

[Timothy Mason]

Forgive me if I am misunderstanding you, but it does seem that this 
conversation, however interesting it may be, has strayed from the 
original point. What sparked it was a paragraph in a newspaper which read :

" Long before children turn 5, there are already enormous gaps in their 
abilities. One study found that 3-year-olds with professional parents 
know about 1,100 words on average, while 3-year-olds whose parents are 
on welfare know only 525. Much of the gap is caused by environment 
rather than genes, according to a wide body of research."

I believe the study being referred to here is Janellen Huttenlocher's, 
who is a psychologist specializing in childhood development. This work 
suggests that children differ in their linguistic development, and that 
much of the difference can be accounted for by interactional factors - 
specifically, the amount of time spent in conversing with their mothers. 
This has implications for the acquisition of both vocabulary and syntax. 
Huttenlocher is not referring to dialectal differences. I find her work 
fairly persuasive, and unsurprising.

Other researchers - I'm thinking of Bernard Lahire, for example - have 
found that interactional factors also influence language competence at 
other levels. Lahire found that some children were unable to construct 
meaningful stories; these children had had less exposure to structured 
narrative than others. They had great difficult learning how to read, 
many of them never achieving fluency.

Work such as this, apart from offering a reasonable and probably 
accurate account of language development and of the relationship between 
background factors and educational success - or lack of it - has the 
advantage of suggesting pedagogical strategies that may help teachers 
intervene and ameliorate. While I would certainly expect my trainees to 
be able to recognize the validity of non-standard linguistic forms, and 
to refrain from dismissing a child on account of her or his use of such 
forms, I would also want them to recognize why some children have more 
difficulties with language than others, and to think of how they could 
help them.

Best wishes

Timothy Mason
Université de Paris 8
Web-site : http://www.timothyjpmason.com/
Blog  (Tracks) : http://timothyjpmason.com/wordpress/