https://gregladen.com/blog/2007/12/19/reduced-verbal-ability-in-afri/ Wed, 26 Dec 2007 06:50:15 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.8 https://gregladen.com/blog/2007/12/19/reduced-verbal-ability-in-afri/#comment-2035 Wed, 26 Dec 2007 06:50:15 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2007/12/19/reduced-verbal-ability-in-afri/#comment-2035 It’s interesting, though, that so much innovative brilliance with language — perhaps more than any other ethnic group with Eng. as its native language — comes from the African-Amer. community, in a lot of cases from the most disadvantaged groups within that communityAs a music teacher I did a whole lot of private study last year with rhyming and the directions its taken (battling, freestyle, Bronx style, LA style, etc.). How do they do it? How do their minds work to make language come out this way? The rhythms, new word usages and connotations, and the philosophies generating that poetry couldn’t in a million years come out of my brain. I am not a member of that community. Fell in love with it again, and have respect the energy source and the innovation, the common sense of it all within that artistic context.I also experienced something fascinating that I would like to explore further at some point, as it relates to Afr. Amer. kids who listen to these rhythms not only on their iPods but in the language rhythms of their environment.After this short immersion in freestyle videos, commentaries and poetry, I returned to a novel I was in the middle of and found that I couldn’t get through the page. I was stuck in a loop. The words weren’t coming into comprehension, and I kept reading and reading the same paragraphs, nothing was “sticking.” The words on that page were not fitting into the beats or the rhythms of that other language that I had been recently steeping myself in, the rhyming. The patterns and stylistics of the rhyming texts were somehow lying dormant in the back of my mind, and the rhythms of the standard fiction text I was now trying to read were just not dissonant with it. I found I had to force myself to get back into the “groove” of the standard English. If I was experiencing that dissonance, and I only worked in that other language environment for just a couple of weeks, can you imagine the dissonance the kids feel when they go back and forth between the two kinds of English every day between home and school?I think we are taking for granted that we can jump back and forth between these two kinds of language just because we understand the meaning of each word. There are really big differences, and we don’t understand the cognitive aspects of trying to juggle both kinds of English throughout the day. Because they are both worthy languages, but there are definitely two of them, not one.

]]> https://gregladen.com/blog/2007/12/19/reduced-verbal-ability-in-afri/#comment-2034 Thu, 20 Dec 2007 14:11:01 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2007/12/19/reduced-verbal-ability-in-afri/#comment-2034 Billy, that is a valid point, and that sort of thing has been looked at (though not in this study) and it matters.

]]> https://gregladen.com/blog/2007/12/19/reduced-verbal-ability-in-afri/#comment-2033 Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:16:48 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2007/12/19/reduced-verbal-ability-in-afri/#comment-2033 Did the researchers also check the teachers?When I was in middle school and high school in western Maryland, every teacher in both schools was white. The few African-American students in the school were treated very differently than the white students. When a teacher asked them a question, the phrasing was simpler, the vocabulary simpler, and the question itself was easier. I do not think this was conscious on the part of the teachers, but preconceptions by white teachers toward African-American students could, possibly, stunt cognitive abilities.

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