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

Language Deprivation 281
language development in Negroes, has argued that the Negro
child is linguistically advanced compared to the middle-class
white child. Entwisle (1970) has carried out a series of studies of
the most basic aspects of language development based largely on
children’s free word associations. Children are asked to give ‘the
first word you think of’ in response to a standard set of stimulus
words. The words represent different degrees of rarity and
different grammatical form classes - nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.
The nature of the child’s associations to the stimulus words
follows a regular developmental sequence. It is the type of response
rather than the specific content of the response that is most
important. Younger children, for example, are much more likely
to give a syntactic phrase completion response to a stimulus word
while older children will respond with another word of the same
grammatical form class, called a paradigmatic association. For
example, to the stimulus word cat the less mature child may
respond with ‘drinks milk’ or ‘nice’; the linguistically more mature
child is likely to respond with ‘dog’ (a noun of the same form)
or ‘animal’ (a noun of a supraordinate category). Or take the
stimulus word begin. The less mature respond with ‘building a
house’, or ‘to cry’ or ‘to eat’, or ‘with’ - all responses showing a
knowledge of how the word is used syntactically. Older children
respond to begin with ‘start’, ‘end’, ‘stop’, and the like. Children of
ages 4 and 5 are also more apt to give so-called klang associations
than older children, e.g., begin - ‘chin’ or ‘lyn’; cat - ‘sat’ or ‘hat’.
Although preschoolers, of course, have never been exposed to
formal grammar, their word associations and their speech reveal
that they have already learned considerable grammar, as indicated
by knowledge of pluralization, verb inflections, etc.
Now, what Entwisle (1970) has found in several studies is that
in terms of these very basic developmental milestones in children’s
acquisition of language, low SES Negro children show a more
precocious rate of development than middle SES white children.
She writes: ‘Word associations of black and of white elementaryschool
children reveal, contrary to expectations, that slum children
are apparently more advanced linguistically than suburban children
at first grade. . . .’ But here is the interesting point:
White [italics added] first-grade slum children of average IQ
give paradigmatic responses to about the same extent as gifted