kitchen table math, the sequel: today's factoid

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

today's factoid

from Richard Whitmire, who has a new blog on boys & education:

Among white male high school seniors with at least one parent who graduated from college, one in four score below basic in reading. That stat borders on breathtaking.
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1 comment:

le radical galoisien said...

From a strictly scientific linguistic point of view, I don't buy sexual dimorphism in language faculties just one bit -- not innately anyway, because as far as evolutionary biology is concerned, evolutionary pressures to develop a universal grammar module would have been equal for both sexes.

If you do *culturally-neutral* (this is key) linguistic tests for example you will find that young children exhibit no statistically significant sexual dimorphism as far as development of morphology, phonology, etc. is concerned (Wug test and so forth).

UPenn's Liberman has done quite a bit to question a lot of linguistic sexual dimorphism literature, particularly those by Dr. Leonard Sax (where if you actually look up his sources, the relevance of his citations to his argument is quite weak).

We shouldn't be quick to jump to the correlation-causation fallacy here, or that poor performance in language scores inherently means that boys have different optimal learning mechanisms than girls. (And I say this from a purely scientific point of view, interested in the truth, and as a first-year interested in cognitive science.)

In so far as what we know about the networks in the brain (and we have discovered a lot of complexities already) for language, there would be no reason to believe that the language faculties around the Sylvian Fissure would be any more enhanced in girls than in boys, and it also really helps to look at the intra-group distributions within the sexes as well. Boys face different cultural expectations than girls, and these are especially poignant come socioeconomic differences. (And I say this as a linguistic nativist who follows the UG line of thought.

September 2, 2008 at 8:00 PM

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