dialect mismatch & the achievement gap

One current [research] focus is on the so-called "achievement gap," which refers to the lower achievement of poor and minority children in school, particularly in areas such as reading. We have begun a project that examines factors that affect African American children's early school achievement, funded by a significant seed grant from the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. This research is being conducted by Julie Washington and Jan Edwards (Comm Dis), David Kaplan (Ed Psych), Maryellen MacDonald, Jenny Saffran, and myself (Psychology), as well as several other faculty. The focus is on ways in which language background affects early school achievement. Most African American children speak the dialect termed African American English, whereas the language in the school is some version of "standard" (also called "mainstream") American English. This dialect mismatch has many effects on the African American child's school experience; it makes tasks such as learning to read literally more difficult than for children for whom there is no dialect mismatch. Our studies focus on young children's knowledge of the alternative dialects, factors that affect ability to switch between dialects, and ways that negative effects of the mismatch can be ameliorated. The idea is to provide supplementary language experiences early, when the child's plasticity for language is high. We can also use our computational models of reading to predict where dialect differences will interfere with progress, and how experience can be structured to improve performance.

Mark S. Seidenberg
Donald O. Hebb Professor
Hilldale Professor
Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
Overview of Research

Seidenberg's "connectionist" model of language learning and grammar contradicts Chomsky:

[S]ince Chomsky's early work, knowledge of language has been equated with knowing a grammar. Many consequences followed from this initial assumption. For example, if the child's problem is to converge on the grammar of a language, then the problem does seem intractable unless there are innate constraints on the possible forms of grammar. What if we abandon the assumption that knowledge of language is represented as a grammar in favor of, say, neural networks, a more recently developed way of thinking about knowledge representation, learning, and processing? Do the same conclusions about the innateness of linguistic knowledge follow? The answer is: not at all.

Our goal, then, has been to articulate an alternative framework for thinking about the classic questions listed above. This is not easy: traditional grammarians have about a 40 year lead on us, and only a few linguists actually think the alternative approach will succeed. However, it's a very interesting moment in the study of language. For many years the study of language was dominating by theoretical linguistics, particularly syntax. More recently, there have been important insights coming from outside of traditional grammatical theory: from computational modeling, from studies of the brain bases of learning and neurodevelopment, from renewed interest in the statistical properties of language (which were ignored for many years following Chomsky's famous observations about the statistical triviality of sentences such as "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously").

Chomsky and his followers have always had their critics. However, there was never an alternative theory that could explain basic facts, such as how children acquire language under the conditions that they do. I think for the first time we have the major components of such a theory in hand. And they suggest the remarkable possibility that the standard conclusions about the nature of language and how it is acquired are just dead wrong. This would be an incredible turn of events, a major development in the intellectual history of the study of language.

That's why it's an interesting moment to be studying language.

publications

Recollection of a Diaspora.

I remember water, lots of water -- warm, cleansing, refreshing. Opening your eyes after rinsing off the shampoo to the sunlight streaming in is a lot like waking up – and you see, that’s my first ever memory of rinsing my hair.

I’m sitting at the kitchen table, watching my mother slicing cucumbers. She’s showing me how to remove the bitter sap by rubbing the tops and bottoms with the chopped ends. I think it’s the oldest piece of advice that I still remember. One day, when you’re old enough, I’ll teach you to cook, she says.

My sister was born after me, but I can’t recall a memory where she wasn’t already there yet. Did you know, she once coloured the living room wall with crayons? I can’t remember what my first memory of a book is. Too many books. I apparently once drew in some of their pages, but I can’t remember doing that. There’s one showing occupations - - bricklayers, doctors, farmers, painters, police officers – and then, kings and queens. What does a king do? What does a king do?

Here comes a book in Chinese! (What do my parents call it? Ah, huawen.) Oh boy! I’m a bit intimidated. How does this work? Well here’s a picture of a little sister. Mei-mei. A picture of an elder brother. Gorh-gorh! But what about big sisters and little brothers? Do they exist, or are brothers always older than sisters?

My parents spoke mostly English to me at home, save when they were explicitly trying to teach me huayu. A curious fact you see, since now I realise that English wasn’t their native language. Chinese came from another dimension, far far away, and came up whenever people wanted to talk about stuff from long, long ago. You used it whenever Chinese New Year came around – it was like a birthday, only for everybody.

I remember my mother stuffing two large oranges into my hands as my family knocked on a large wooden door. “Give to Pohr-Pohr!” she said. I can’t remember what I asked – something along the lines of, “Why does she want them?” or “Why do you want me to do it?” She hushes me. The door opens and out pour the greetings in Chinese. I wait to say my line before stretching my arms high above me to give my oranges to a familiar and kindly old woman. Inside lay a kitchen table full of food, old-fashioned but good: the reward for putting up with all the Chinese.

I remember sometime later I had the epiphany that my immediate family had four people – one day we were all standing together in the lift and I decided to count them, taking care to include myself. It would be much later before I realised that Pohr-Pohr was my mother’s mother. It was weird at the time to think your parents had parents. It was also weird because I only saw my father’s mother once, in a land called Malaysia, and I never thought of her as Pohr-Pohr. Pohr-Pohr only ever spoke in huayu to me – she would falter if she tried to use English. Her flat was from another era; everything about it was old, and huawen was found everywhere. Outside, the housing estate was surrounded by a forest of tall, thick trees that arched above the roads – trees that had probably been there forever. My grandfather, who I called Gong-gong, spoke neither English nor huayu. He would speak to my mother and Pohr-Pohr in a language no one ever tried to teach me.

Out of the alternatives to English, I think I liked Malay the best. It was enchanting, charming, and perhaps most importantly, it was written with the alphabet. Some people spoke it, though they tended to be old-fashioned like my Pohr-Pohr. You found it on placenames (like Kembangan, or my Pohr-Pohr’s place, Telok Blangah), and in songs I learnt to sing. You’d also find it in the names of foods, like katong laksa, but that didn’t really count, because there it was part of Singlish, and everyone spoke that. A lot of Malay was shared with Singlish, in contrast to huayu, which was rarely shared.

I probably would have been an enthusiastic Malay student, but my father generally refrained from teaching it. I didn’t really like Chinese class in preschool. If one thing epitomised everything I dreaded about “Chinese” for me at that time, it was my laoshi: a towering plumpish woman with a haughty, fearsome voice, dressed in a weird and gaudy floral fusion of a sari and a silk robe from the Chinese dimension. While the rest of my friends enthusiastically chimed in the right words and phrases, I always felt it was a miserable game of playing catch-up and being too scared to ask the laoshi what was going on (in huayu of course). My laoshi was a good taskmaster though, because I remember writing a fair bit of huawen under her, carefully tracing strokes with my neatest handwriting. Tracing huawen was a bit like colouring – you had to make sure you didn’t deviate from the lines.

One day, my parents decided to move to a land called America.

I was told it was a big, big place, far away across the sea on the other side of the world, more far away than Malaysia or China, where my Gong-gong came from. Some of my friends (and my teachers) knew about it. “America is better than Singapore. You should be excited!” they essentially said.

(We’ll miss you though.)

We visited first. I remember my first sights of Cape Elizabeth, and my first visit to the Lobster Shack. The people there spoke differently; the adults liked to call you “honey,” initially a source of constant puzzlement, and likewise they appeared confused when you tried to address them as “auntie” or “uncle”. In the summer, America didn’t feel very far away – it was like any other place your parents took you to, only instead of being whisked off to Telok Blangah, Jurong or Bukit Timah by bus, you were being whisked off to America on a plane.

In Singapore, we packed and I watched my toys and books disappear into boxes. Sometimes, my sister and I would be left at my Pohr-Pohr’s house while my parents did very important business elsewhere, collecting us only at night. This was cool at first, but the toys were strange, the books were all in huawen, and my Pohr-Pohr’s flat was just too old, too repressive, too Chinese. It’s one of the most dreadful feelings in the world, not knowing why your parents won’t come back for you yet, and when none of the adults can understand what you really want to say. Outside of my Pohr-Pohr’s windows lay the world, full of high-rise flats and tall city buildings that rose in the distance. Despite my searching eyes, none of them contained my home; none of the people in them were my parents. Of all the places I had been to, my Pohr-Pohr’s flat felt the furthest from home. I broke down – I bawled, I cried – and then my Gong-gong took me in his arms and sung me a beautiful song I never heard before, in a language that was not huayu.

Our second flight to Maine occurred during a big blizzard of a Nor’easta. Los Angeles didn’t feel very different from Singapore; I had to put my coat on upon touching down in Chicago because it was truly the Windy City, though I saw one lady wearing a fruit basket for a hat; but in Maine it was pouring snow, and before I had previously thought snow was only found in fairy tales.

I remember my first day at an American kindergarten. First, there was the ride on a yellow school bus, which I had never seen before. The whole playground was shrouded in fog – “like clouds, but on the ground,” my mother had said, and I discovered how the clouds became see-through as you got closer, breaking any hope of ever resting on one. It was a vast playground compared to what I had known in Singapore, and I remember the Ciocca twins pushing each other on swings, and how I couldn’t keep straight which one was Alicia and which one was Sonia.

In some ways, integration into the American education system was not difficult. Americans spoke English, and I spoke a different form of English, and this fact usually wasn’t a great hindrance. Best of all, there was no dreaded Chinese, and the truths of math and science didn’t change from country to country. We grew monarch caterpillars on milkweed and watched them make chrysallises to then emerge as monarch butterflies, flying away in the wind to a place called Mexico. By now I had been given a world atlas, which I had devoured; I had mapped the distance from Singapore to Maine and felt like I was the only one who appreciated the distance the butterflies travelled.

Nevertheless, for a while I was placed into ESL, though for a while I did not recognise it for what it was, since it was just another class. Perhaps it was standard practice for any migrant child who didn’t come from the UK, Canada, Australia or New Zealand. I remember the lady who worked with me, who couldn’t keep straight where I came from. “You’re from China, right? You look Chinese.”

I remember being self-conscious of how I looked like for the first time: that realisation of I look like people in China but not like people in America.

It was funny how I didn’t realise until then how Chinese and China were related. China, I learnt, had a shameful history, defeated in countless engagements with the West because of its backwardness and old-fashionedness. And while the American Revolution was championed and the English Revolution was literally glorious, my mother told me the Chinese Revolution “wasn’t a good one.”

Some years later I was told that my parents had purposely refrained from teaching too much Chinese at too young at age to me. English was more important for getting by in the world, and people who spoke only Chinese were marginalised. And it was thus from common experience they had concluded that, “it is easy to learn Chinese once you have mastered English, but to learn English knowing only Chinese is difficult.”¹ And in America, smugly proud of my increasing strength in English and my increasing deficiency in Chinese, I marvelled at the brilliance of my parents’ decision while my command of huayu slowly died away.

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1. Most linguists would now reject this idea, because of what we now know about language acquisition.

linguistics, sign language and writing

With my previous post on a "phonetic basis" to language, I should make it clear that I consider signed languages to be close analogues to spoken languages. (From what I know, this is a commonly-accepted fact among linguists.)

However, one thing that linguistics hasn't really provided a unified theory is explaining cognitively what happens for sign language -- part of the problem is that a lot of people still perceive sign languages as proxies for spoken language, or an alternative to speaking, that is, taking signed systems to be like writing systems. This doesn't bode well for scientific attention or funding...

We know sign language systems are very similar to phonetic systems, and in fact can be analysed like a phonetic system as far as dynamics like sound change, lexical diffusion, acquisition, etc. goes, and signs can be broken down into equivalents of phonemes, etc. -- the most pertinent difference generally is that a signed language is often capable of much more co-articulation than a spoken one. (Co-articulation is very common in all spoken languages, but we can usually co-articulate sound elements only if their places of articulation are far enough apart. The /t/ in "tea" for example, is a co-articulated phoneme, composed of a consonant not unlike the Spanish [t] and aspiration [h].) Sign language is not ideographic either. The fundamental permitted gestures in a sign language do not represent "ideas" -- like phonemes, by themselves they are often meaningless, until combined together. The gestures obey the recombination principle -- if you make one gesture and then another to form a word, that word is not necessarily releated in meaning to either gesture, much like "party" is not a semantic fusion of the concepts "par" and "tea".

Signed languages are so similar to phonetic languages that they are often used as alternate means to research child language acquisition, especially in crosslingual settings, often because it's very common for the parents of deaf children not to be native speakers/signers of the language the child learns to speak/sign. (The other research sources that have been useful in the field are migrant families and pidgin-creole communities.)

Similarities include a critical window for sign language -- children who learn it early invariably become fluent signers, excepting cases like those with neurological disorders; children who hit puberty before learning to sign generally never become native-level signers except with intensive study. And even then, errors are frequent and signing is more jerky and less fluid.

A deaf infant, instead of babbling, will instead do the equivalent with his hands. In fact, the timeline for sign language acquisition among children is so similar to spoken language acquisition -- e.g. we can expect a six-year-old signer to be very fluent, replete with different inflections, conjugations, declensions, irregular constructions and syntactical phrase-shifting -- that biologically the mechanism for sign language acquisition must be very similar to the mechanism for spoken language acquisition.

Even signed languages obey all the rules of Chomsky's Universal Grammar. I won't go into hardcore syntax here, but the idea is that there are universal rules that govern language, where expressions can be analysed as sets of verb phrases and noun phrases, with embedding rules and phrase-order rules, and in the way the order of a phrase can be shifted in different situations. An example that gets used frequently for English-speaking audiences for the principle of shifting word orders is when you ask a question -- which verb and subject do you invert? When being asked to turn a sentence with a relative clause like, "The goat that is in the garden is eating the flowers" into a question, invariably all the young children fluent enough to understand the sentence invert the right phrases. They do not form constructions like "goat the that is in the garden eating the flowers" or "is the goat that in the garden is eating the flowers?" -- and Chomsky argues this must be a consequence of a natural rule of universal grammar, known as the argument of the poverty of the stimulus. For one, children learning language-specific rules generally demonstrate their acquisition of the rules in stages, just as we regularly observe young children saying "he hitted her!", "I bringed juice for doggie" or "she giggled me!" -- evidence that they haven't completely learnt the rule. But we observe no children making wrong inversions. There are other arguments too -- like how children would learn such an elaborate algorithm, and use it so fluently and automatically?

Teenage and adult learners of sign languages, however, generally commit many violations of universal grammar, probably because they are not using their L1 cognitive machinery to process the language, which would automatically organise words into phrases (e.g. mentally organising like "goat that is in the garden" into a noun phrase, or NP) and clauses -- just like learners of spoken languages. The ability to analyse a sign language along noun-phrase / verb-phrase lines isn't necessary for an ideographic system; try telling a linguistics student to find the noun phrase or a verb phrase in a picture, painting or musical score and you will get protests about the silliness of the effort. Computer language isn't organised along VP/NP lines.... and not even veteran computer programmers can "think" in the computer languages they know well; it's always "code" and generally not a very effective medium for thought for humans, even though computers do very well, performing vast amounts of symbolic operations in it.

Sign languages can be generated spontaneously, and are capable of undergoing a process called "creolisation" like spoken languages. It's the spontaneous origins of many sign languages that make their study useful to many linguists working in spoken languages -- it sheds light on the origin of language in general. Children, when exposed to a stimulus composed of ungrammatical or pidgin language (e.g. migrant parents on a plantation, a colony composed of many ethnicities speaking each other's languages brokenly, non-native parents who sign imperfectly), without a good competing grammatical stimulus, will spontaneously generate corrective rules. The resulting language they produce obeys a grammar, complying with all the rules of universal grammar -- and is as complex and full-fledged as any other language. It's a good example of how grammar, though it may be culturally transmitted, is a partial consequence of universal biology. However, for spontaneous language generation to occur, you need at least two people -- a baby raised by wolves will not generate his own language, while there exist many documented cases of a secret grammatically full-fledged language, spoken between two close twins.

Spontaneous language generation can fuse different source languages -- the most prominent examples are creoles like Haitian Creole, combining elements from French, Spanish, African and indigeneous languages into a new grammatical system; I speak a creole called Singlish, with elements from Hokkien/Teochew Chinese, Malay, English, among others. With signed languages, the most prominent example is the emergence of a single "Nicaraguan Sign Language" (LSN) from the pooling together of home sign after the first schools for the deaf were opened in Nicaragua in 1979. Suddenly, previously isolated deaf children were pooling signs on playgrounds, schoolbusses, classrooms, and then becoming fast friends and signing to each other in each other's homes... However, this LSN was like the pidigin language that parents of immigrant children speak, a mixture of the various languages of their new environment; the conventions were often irregular, with jerky, non-fluid signing, and trends rather than real grammatical rules. The younger children exposed to LSN weren't content; they took it and transformed it into Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN), spontaneously standardising many of the grammatical rules and making many patterns that were previously mere trends obligatory. The new language also simplified many of the common constructions like a native language would, and had all the classic signs of assimilation rules found in natural spoken language. How a group of 4- to 8-year-olds achieves such efficient consensus on a matter like creating a unified "fusion" language has to be pretty fascinating if you ask me; the process is probably unconscious and memetic. I imagine a single child having a particularly ingenious way of signing something; some other child sees it and with excited eyes gestures something to the effect of "oh that's such a cool sign!" and then soon everyone's copying it. It's such a good meme that it outcompetes all other signing patterns for the same concept or grammatical rule; some signs occupy a slightly different niche (slightly different connotations, etc.) and they survive, becoming the signed equivalents of synonyms. Repeat for each convention. The process of creolisation is effectively identical for speaking children, only with spoken words.

There's a good argument to make for the idea that objectively, all languages have equal difficulty to the infant, and ultimately have all the same complexity and are biologically constrained to be that way. Latin has a mediumly-complex inflection system that tortures high school students, but on the other hand it only has a collection of word order rules that are not very strict and relatively simple phonology; Chinese languages have little inflectional grammar but have complex syntactical and phonological rules; when English dropped the sheer majority of the gender, case and conjugation systems, it converted other previously-normal words into grammatical auxiliaries and suddenly gained a complex word order system, and when English dropped vowel length distinction, it also started recognising a large degree of other vowel phonemes that previously didn't exist, and as such, English has a large amount of vowels compared to most other languages. English vowels are a torture for Arabic speakers, who have only 3 vowel qualities, yet an abundance of exotic consonants. In fact a general rule I'd like to propose is when a language is undergoing a change that will simplify or add complexity to its grammar, it must also undergo a complementary change that will compensate for the added or removed complexity in the opposite direction -- in a different area of course.

So that would imply signed languages must be as equally complex as spoken languages -- just extracting grammatical information from the secondary visual cortex rather than say, the auditory cortex. Curiously, the frontal cortex, auditory cortex and visual cortex converge roughly around the Sylvian Fissure, along which are located several important sites for language processing (though recent research suggests we've misidentified the actual locations of Broca's and Wernicke's areas -- partially because of the imprecision of the 1800s). Research into signed languages may have implications for phonics and children who learn spoken languages, and learn to read and write in them, because it shows the brain can process visual information grammatically. It is not the case however, that the visual information in sign language can be processed as a direct representation of symbolic thought and ideas: damage the same language centres that speaking people use, and sign language ability goes with it. In fact, Google tells me there's some good research out there on "sign language aphasia".

However, there's some further complexity for neuroscientific research into linguistic processing and the shared machinery that spoken and signed languages would both use because of the concept of neurplasticity. If you damage or lesion the areas commonly regarded as Broca's Area and Wernicke's Area in a child that is young enough (e.g. a large fall at two weeks of age), the child will probably grow up into a normal, healthy, fast-talking young child. Why? The appropriate neural tissue couldn't develop in the place it usually develops, so it develops somewhere else, sometimes in radically different areas (and later the remnants of these lesions show up 30 years later on medical imaging scans in an otherwise neurologically-normal patient). But neuroplasticity is also probably part of the mechanism for native-level sign language processing; if a language centre is supposed to be receiving signals from the auditory cortex but isn't (or isn't receiving enough signals, as with a damaged ear or damaged auditory cortex), some neuroplasticity mechanism probably has it adapt to processing from the visual cortex instead, and growing and sending out networks and pioneer neurons accordingly. Notably, the degree of neuroplasticity is greatest in children -- if being fluent in a language requires your language processing centres to send out pioneer axons (or even new neurons or networks) to the appropriate auditory or visual cortex and vice versa, and you're 13 years old ... well, hard luck.