A Critique of Studies on the Effect of Social Experience on Language Development

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

A very large part of social behavior consists of activities such as speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Accordingly, the school, as a major and vital institution, has the primary responsibility for teaching all children those symbols which are necessary for independent functioning in a modern technological society. Most of these symbols, however, are both verbal and abstract. Verbal symbols are the most essential and prevalent kinds of representations found in a formal situation. The ability to acquire words or symbols, and to use them efficiently, is therefore a highly useful and rewarded characteristic in our society. The primary concern of the school, then, is to assist the child in acquiring language facility and usage. A child who is unable to understand how to use language in an appropriate manner would be at an obvious disadvantage in school related situations. The degree to which he/she is unable to use language skills adequately could cause difficulties in the acquisition of academic information. The culturally different black child is one who seems to be in such a precarious educational position. These are the children in the school population who have been reared in neighborhoods where adequate food, housing, and intellectual stimulation are said to be absent. The lower socio-economic environment may be characterized as an experientially depressed milieu which neither facilitates nor enhances the opportunity to use fundamental cognitive processes in a manner that is needed to succeed in the ordinary book learning school setting. As a case in point, some researchers have suggested that certain idiosyncratic conceptual abilities tend to exacerbate over time as a result of the social inequities to which this particular group of American youth