For Roeper, nobody's language is
good or bad, right or wrong. No language deserves to be dissed
as "primitive" or "unsophisticated." Every
individual speaker of every dialect of every language on the
planet helps to illuminate the "Universal Grammar"
that is the Holy Grail of linguistic scholarship.
Linguists start with the assumption that none of us is born
with a genetically determined aptitude for any one language
? Cherokee rather than French, Hebrew rather than Finnish,
Japanese rather than Urdu, or whatever ? but that we all come
into the world with an innate language-learning ability that
we apply to the task of mastering whatever communication system
we encounter in our formative years. Just as no spoken language
uses all the sounds our vocal apparatus can produce, none
makes use of all the grammatical rules and structures our
minds are capable of comprehending. Every version of every
language, therefore, provides its own distinctive window on
human language capability in general. Whether spoken by hundreds
of millions, like Chinese, or by a mere handful, like Arapaho,
every human tongue offers an equally valuable glimpse of the
Universal Grammar that is the common heritage of our entire
species.
Languages have many different systems of rules governing such
matters as plurals, verb tenses, conditional and subjunctive
statements, the significance of word order in sentences, and
the uses of pitch and tone. Some languages allow double negatives.
Some use articles to distinguish between one particular object
(the book) and any object in that category (a book); others
get along without that distinction. Some, like Russian and
Navajo, ring many different changes (known to grammarians
as inflections) on their verbs; others, like English, use
barely any verb inflection at all. A newborn infant has no
predisposition to choose any of these options, but possesses
a natural ability to master any of them. In order to understand
this universal language facility, Roeper has made a specialty
of studying young children in the process of learning their
native languages.
Seymour has also made children's language the focus of his
professional life, but he looks at the subject from another
perspective. He does not entirely share the linguist's laissez
faire attitude that there is no incorrect grammar, only deficits
in language ability. He agrees that no dialect of English
(or any other language) is right or wrong in comparison with
any other dialect, but within a given dialect he does recognize
the existence of rights and wrongs, norms and deviations.
As a speech-language therapist, he aims to help children overcome
a variety of speech deficits or disorders ? some stemming
from physical deformities in the vocal mechanism, others from
a variety of psychological or cognitive problems. "Linguists
take a very open-minded attitude about all languages and dialects,"
Seymour says. He adds that "they're all perfectly legitimate
and equivalent in terms of what they bring to the communicative
table. As speech-language pathologists, we're forced to make
certain decisions that something is sufficiently deviant from
'normal' that there is a need for some clinical intervention."
The tricky part is defining what constitutes normalcy. In
too many cases, Seymour has seen racial attitudes contributing
to inaccurate diagnosis and inappropriate treatment of black
children. "When I attempt to establish that referent
of normalcy," he cautions, "I have to be careful
that I'm not applying norms that are external to a child's
community. Deficits do not reside in dialects, they reside
in individuals. If you define a whole dialect as a problem,
then you say all the folks who use that dialect have a problem.
But there's something wrong with that."
He offers the example of two kids ? one a white suburban speaker
of standard American English, the other a black child who
speaks African-American English ? who both produce the sentence,
"He going to the store." By omitting "is"
before "going," the white child is departing from
standard English norms, which may indicate a language impairment
that requires a therapist's intervention. But the black speaker
is conforming to the norms of African-American English. "In
one case," Seymour says, "a child is doing it because
he has some impairment that is preventing him from speaking
the way his peers do. In the other situation we have a kid
who's born into a speech community that typically forms the
sentence that way. Those are two very different kids. One
kid is not doing it like his peers because of some disability.
The other kid is doing it like his peers and it's quite normal."
In all likelihood, Seymour says, the percentage of black kids
who need some kind of speech therapy is about the same as
the percentage of white kids who need the same thing. For
the time being, though, it is extremely difficult for speech
therapists to diagnose the needs of African-American schoolchildren
because there is no standardized test that takes Black English
norms into account. Seymour fears that as long as this remains
the case, black children will continue to suffer a double
whammy. "Talking black" will be regarded as a speech
disorder in and of itself, with the result that many black
kids who don't suffer from any language deficit will be shunted
undeservedly into special education classes. And at the same
time, black children who do have language problems, whose
speech deviates in some way from the norms of their own communities,
will go undiagnosed and miss out on the help they need.
One key goal of Seymour and Roeper's research project ? which
involves taping hours of black children's speech, analyzing
the tapes utterance by utterance, and compiling the results
in a vast computer data base ? is to produce a diagnostic
speech test grounded in a thorough understanding of Black
English, so that African-American students who need help can
get it, while those who do not can escape being unfairly stigmatized.
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