Thursday, January 04, 2007

 

Expressive Language "Delays"

Sorry for the quotes. I do want this post to be find-able, but I can't bring myself to jump on the diagnosis bandwagon. I could go around diagnosing everything and everyone in my house as failing to meet normative goals for health and happiness, and I maintain that we're hardly riddled with pathology for the diagnosing. We do continue to be riddled with fleas, though.

Some info for parents whose tykes express no interest in speaking, but appear otherwise bizarrely normal in their own freaky little ways, just like mine:

1. The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (to tell which percentile your little freaky talker falls into, at least according to those (I'm sure) wildly expert test-maker statisticians (how reliable) costs $99. I'm sure that adds to its widespread dissemination and therefore its accuracy.

Meanwhile, you can expect your low income baby or non-white toddler to score much lower than her/his upper class white counterparts. Don't even order the test, just pick a nice white score and drop 10 percentage points. Proof that white rich people ARE smarter and better? It must be (scoff). Use it as a reason to continue to vote to obliterate poor people into dust if you will, since clearly this means they should not reproduce, since they and their offspring are just too stupid to ever get ahead. This must be why they're poor.

2. Teaching parents to teach "target" words to their kids...ta da~! Teaches target words to their kids. I admit, I'm blown away.

I'm floored by the (sarcastic) intellectualism of the studies in language "pathology" that are currently out there. Let us all praise speech/language pathologists for intervening early. And thank god I just spent one of my last days on the full-text study databases (sniff) reading these things. And while we're at it, thank goodness we're not living in the 1800's when late talkers just never bothered learning language. Oh wait, that never happened.

Comments:
People should read this.
 
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