Diskurzivna neenakost in konstrukcija »govorno-jezikovnega primanjkljaja« deprivilegiranih družin in otrok

Abstract

Discursive inequality in the construction of the »speech-language deficit« of deprived families and children In the second half of the 20th century, disciplines such as linguistics, sociolinguistics, and sociology were the first to inquire into the connection between the social position (of families) and the linguistic dispositions of children – these authors were also the ones who provided theoretical and methodological means to support the research. But the recent decades have seen a slow change in the ‘leading’ disciplines – with the greater role given to developmental psychology, speech therapy, pedagogy and neuroscience. This has brought some accompanying changes: the corpus of gathered data has rapidly grown and the correlation between socio-economic status and child development was given more focus (and was more concisely outlined) than ever before. And alongside that – the authors have shifted attention toward factors of early familial environments and their role in ‘social reproduction’: in the social inheritance of developmental deficits in disadvantaged children. But this growing body of data (gathered with standardized instruments and new technology) has allowed some theoretical “fluidity”. Previous models were replaced with less coherent descriptive categories. For example; the social class was transformed into “socio-economic index” or “status” and has lately dispersed to numerous descriptive remarks on the “quality” of familial environment and parenting strategies (of privileged/disadvantaged parents). Considering linguistic categories: authors have dropped attempts to study semantic, semiotic, and contextual aspects of language use and have focused solely on the lexical and syntactical attributes of particular environments and speakers. These changes have abruptly broken the line of causality that was developed by Bernstein and systemic functional linguistics. The “stream” of discursive reproduction of inequality has lost its previous interpretative power. But not only that – the new research has unforeseen consequences. For example, individualisation of social inequality; the blaming of (poor) parents for their seeming inability to provide enough linguistic stimulation. And lastly the reduction of complex relations of social inequality on some (calculable) developmental pathologies in disadvantaged children – that one can measure and “repair” thorough pedagogic/therapeutic means. Key words: discursive inequality, speech and language development, disadvantaged social groups, individualisation, social inequality, social reproduction