Language and Friendship

[lillibet]

As most of you know, I record textbooks for Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic. This week I was assigned to a textbook I've read parts of in earlier sessions that deals with language deficits and impairments. I was reading the chapter about school-age children and was impressed with how it outlined the specific and complex language tasks that are part of everyday school experience (e.g. quickly switching modalities between listening/speaking/reading/writing, following a story (holding information in memory and retrieving it to make connections with new material) and answering questions about it, participating in class discussions, etc.) and the ways in which even minor language impairment can make these tasks extremely challenging.

One of the issues that it raised was a completely new thought for me, although one that was immediately obvious once raised: people with language impairment have difficulty establishing close peer relationships. I thought about it, about how hard it is to be friends with someone who doesn't understand the conversational turn-taking exchange, who may not respond or respond with entirely irrelevant statements, who may respond to direct questions without adding anything or asking follow-up questions, who may have significant trouble retrieving words in realtime. Of course that would make things difficult.

Then I started thinking about my closest friends and the ways in which our very similar levels of language proficiency play a huge part in our relationship. Being able to depend on them to understand what I say and to explain what they mean and to be willing to do both is key. That led to thinking about the many brilliant and interesting people of my acquaintance who do seem to have the kinds of language deficits under discussion in the book, but whose high intelligence has permitted them to establish coping strategies and excel in other ways, such that their deficit is not perceived, or attributed to personality quirk.

I think this line of thought may be spooling through my general pondering for quite a while. Don't be surprised if I try to talk to you about it.

Comments

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

That's very interesting. I--and most of my close friends--have similar histories. Have you ever read the notes on geek-speech that were written by a linguist whose sister is a con-goer? (I'd supply a link, but my google-fu is failing me.) One of the things she noticed is that because geeks tend to have a much larger read-vocabulary than spoken-vocabulary, it is not at all uncommon to hear people correct each other's pronunciation without offense being taken (e.g. "It's indeFATigable." "Really?" "Yup." "Oh. So, as I was saying..."). When a volunteer starts at RFB&D there's a list of commonly mispronounced words that they encourage you to look up for yourself (the shocker for me was DESultory, although I was also appalled that the OED's preferred pronunciation is arCHEtypal and that Merriam-Webster accepts nucular for "nuclear").

Anyway, I tend to think of early-reading as being part of my high language proficiency and am curious as to what problems you think it has caused you.

[heliopsis.livejournal.com]

the shocker for me was DESultory,

That is a shocker! As for "archetypal," the British pronunciation does indeed stress the second syllable, but my dictionary says the American pronunciation has stress on the first and third syllables. I think I would find it hard to understand what a British speaker was saying, if she were to stress the second syllable.

I mispronounced detritus for years, stressing the second syllable instead of the first (though I see my current dictionary allows either pronunciation). As my Norwegian grandmother used to say, "The stupid English language!"

Your original post reminds me of a line from, I think, George Carlin: "Don't you wish that people who have trouble communicating would just shut up?"