Educability-and-Group-Differences-1973-by-Arthur-Robert-Jensen

16 Language deprivation
The use of dialect and often ‘ungrammatical’ English in the speech
of children called disadvantaged lends plausibility to the popular
belief that these children’s generally lower IQs and scholastic
progress are attributable to environmentally caused verbal and
linguistic deficits. We read that
Children from low socioeconomic groups develop deficits in
intellectual functioning because they lack adequate intellectual,
particularly verbal, stimulation . . . children in these groups
receive less verbal stimulation from parents - through being
talked to, read to, taken on trips, etc. - than children in middleclass
groups, and the parents are usually not very good
examples for children to follow in learning language. (Furfey
& Harte, 1970, p. 313)
It is to be expected that children from homes where certain
words are used will do better on a vocabulary test involving
those words than will children from homes where the words
are never heard . . . most intelligence tests are loaded with
middle-class content that is found to be more familiar to white
children than to Negro children. (Brown, 1965, p. 186)
Such statements do indeed appear very plausible, even self-evident.
But is linguistic deprivation actually an adequate explanation of
intelligence differences The point is not at issue that learning
good English is an advantage to upward social mobility. We are
not concerned here with these secondary social consequences of
grammar and dialect, but rather with the effect of language on