Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

156 Language Diversity in the ClassroomA study by Edwards (1979a) tested some of the implications oflanguage perceptions and prestige in a group of prepubertal children.Physiological sex differences relating to speech production are, of course,not very marked in such children, but earlier work had confirmed whatcommon-sense knows: on the basis of speech samples alone, listeners cantypically distinguish boys from girls with a high degree of accuracy; seeMeditch (1975), Sachs (1975), Sachs et al. (1973) and Weinberg and Bennett,(1971). It is children’s early adherence to social norms concerning maleand female speech that allows such accuracy in sex-identification. In mystudy, voice samples of 20 working-class and 20 middle-class 10-year-oldswere presented to 14 adult judges (Irish trainee teachers) whose task was,simply, to identify the gender of each speaker. As well, five other judgeswere asked to rate all the voices on four dimensions related tomasculinity/femininity.It was found, first of all, that for both boys and girls the voices ofworking-class children were perceived as rougher and more masculinethan those of their middle-class counterparts; that is, the associationbetween masculinity and working-class speech that I have alreadydiscussed was confirmed. As in previous work, there was a high overalldegree of accuracy in sex-identification (about 84%, in fact), but the majorfinding of the study, one that further supports notions of covert prestige,was that the errors made were not randomly distributed. First of all,female judges were more accurate than their male counterparts inidentifying children’s gender. This accords with Meditch’s (1975) resultsand, more importantly, with both scholarly and informal observations offemales’ greater sensitivity in interpersonal relationships in general, andin verbal interactions in particular. Secondly, beyond the differentialaccuracy of male and female judge-listeners, a significant interaction wasfound in terms of errors made between social class and gender. Thatis, among the working-class children, few boys were mistaken as girls,but errors made about girls were considerably greater. For the middleclasschildren, the pattern was reversed, and more errors were made withthe boys than with the girls.The explanation provided for these results can be briefly summarizedhere. It would appear as if the general masculinity of working-classspeech caused girls to be misidentified as boys by the middle-classjudges. Middle-class speech, relatively more feminine, allowed theoperation of what we might term the ‘boys sound like girls’ principle.This reflects the fact that, at puberty, it is boys’ speech that changes mostmarkedly in assuming adult characteristics. Different social conventionsoperate for working-class and middle-class speech, young children are