Listervelt Middleton> Good evening and welcome to For the People and our new Sunday schedule.

We plan to continue to bring you closer to those persons, groups, and ideas that shed light on the past and bring the future into sharper focus.

While we'll continue to take you through the different rooms of our past.

We will give added emphasis to the future by finding out what Black scientists think about genetic engineering.

What is the promise of the Sun Belt?

And how can Africans around the world make telecommunications work for us instead of against us?

Next week, live, Dr.

Asa G. Hilliard, III, a Fuller E Calloway Professor of Urban Education at Georgia State University.

And the following Sunday Live, Mr.

George Trower Subira, author of Black Folks Guide to Making Big Money.

And later on, the highly respected Dr.

Vincent Harding, author of There Is a River.

But this evening we turn our attention to South Carolina State College, where a group of researchers have taken to the road in search of speech, rural children speech.

And this is where it all takes place.

Aboard a 34 foot long, custom made van equipped with the latest speech recording and analysis equipment.

On board are Dr.

Freda Wilson, principal investigator, Dr.

Johnny Wilson, co-investigator and designer of the 28,500 pound mobile unit.

Ms.

Gwen Wilson, research audiologist, Ms.

Marie Gosnell, Student Research language sampler, Ms Francine Brewster, student research audiologic assistant.

Ms.

Sharon Dowling, student research language sampler and Ms Esther Rivers, standard testing research assistant.

Dr.

Freda Wilson> The purpose of 1890 CIRC is to describe the communication behavior of rural children, children between the ages of six months and six years.

We're going to look at how children learn to talk through the various stages of language development.

There are five basic stages of language development that we look at.

These stages are: Stage one is when a child is just becoming aware of himself as a communicator.

They, coo, babble.

Sometimes they gurgle and dribble.

They start to localize to sounds.

They just learn to let other people know that they are existing in their environment.

Stage two deals with the beginning of word usage when children start to say, Mommy and Daddy, go and so forth.

Stage three is when they start to put words together; mommy go, daddy, car me eat, and so on.

Stages four and five deal with the further development of words into sentences, phrases, and more complex sentences so that this study is designed to track young children as they learn how to communicate.

You might wonder why we are looking at children between the ages of six months to six years.

The reason we're looking at children in this age category is that this is the period when most children learn language, or it's the time when most communication is learned by any human being.

Once we, take a child on the mobile unit, he has three basic things that he will participate in.

One, he will have his hearing evaluated.

He gets a complete audio metric protocol.

And by that I mean we find out is he is aware of sound, if he is able to respond to sounds that are high and low and in between.

We also determine whether or not he can discriminate and recognize speech.

So that's the first procedure that he undergoes, a hearing assessment.

Ms.

Gwen Wilson> What you have here is a t audiometer used to test hearing.

All the children seen in the project are scheduled for a hearing evaluation.

Mounted on top of this diagnostic audiometer is what is called a core system conditioned, oriented reflex equipment, which is what it does, is pairs a tonal stimuli with a visual stimuli, and children are distracted and then directed to look at this visual stimuli, when both are presented simultaneously.

We also have here a brainstem audiometer which is capable of testing the hearing.

of very young infants used most widely with children under age 18 months.

Inside this sound treated room, we also have an impedance audiometer, which is capable of testing or directly measuring impedance in the middle ear system.

It is also sometimes referred to as a middle ear analyzer.

If a child has an ear infection, or any pathology in the middle ear system, this equipment is very sensitive.

We can pick it, pick it up.

We also get a get an automatic readout on what is going on in the middle ear system.

Now, to begin with, we have a procedure used with children under three years of age and a different procedure used for children over three years of age.

Children under three are used primarily, or seen primarily using the core system.

They are conditioned, as I said before, to look at a visual stimuli when a tone stimuli is presented and the intensity of the sound or the loudness of the sound is varied.

And of course, we are recording all along the softest level of sound at which we receive a or observe a response.

We also get a response to speech stimuli using something very familiar to the child, usually his name, and give him, a directive at the end of that procedure for the children under three.

They are then seen for impedance audiometry.

For the children above age three, we use a technique called play audiometry, wherein the child is taught a game, a listening game, and he is directed to put a block in a container every time he hears a tone.

And of course, we are recording thresholds or the lowest level at which the child responds to these sounds.

And of course, that is always compared to the results that compare to normal.

After we get the pure tone, test results, we get what is called speech audiometry.

And during that test, we are trying to determine the lowest level in which a child, receives speech.

After that procedure, these children above age three then are seen for impedance audiometry, which is the same as I described for the kids under three.

We also have a brainstem audiometer, that is being used, as I said, with very, very young children.

Now, for demonstration purposes, if I may just show you, that is a warble, pure tone stimuli that children are asked, not asked.

But, expected to respond to.

This, again, is a warble, pure tone of a different frequency, and children are expected to respond to that at various levels.

As with children under three, the core system is used and a visual stimuli in which you have, copies of that is paired with this tonal stimuli, and the child responds.

Dr.

Freda> The second procedure that he will undergo will be a sampling of his language.

This procedure entails, finding out how well children talk by showing him objects and or pictures and or simply just talking to a child, we get a spontaneous, analysis of what are the types of words he knows and uses, what are the kinds of sentences he uses, what meanings he has in his language.

Marie Gosnell> Okay, this is the language sampling room.

In this room, we talk to the child, and our main objective is to have the child talk to us.

We want to see the types of speech the child uses and, (Katie speaks) just what her general conversational level is.

So we talk about things that are interesting to children.

And mostly we listen.

Yes.

Katie> We talking.

Katie> Where my ...gone?

Marie> Oh it's gone isn't it.

Open it up and put it on the doll.

I'll be talking to Katie and she will be doing things that indicate if she knows what this is, she'll know what to do with this.

So tell me what this is, Katie.

What do you, what do you have here?

What do you have?

Katie> Lotion Marie> Lotion.

That's right.

Show me what can we do with the lotion.

Katie> Put it on the baby.

Marie> Okay, put it on the baby.

Put a little bit on your finger first.

Good.

That's a lot of lotion.

Okay, I'm going to put the top on, and you show me what you can do with the lotion.

Yeah.

Katie, will you tell me what you doing?

Katie, what are you doing?

Katie> Putting it on the baby.

Marie> Very good.

So Katie's telling me what she's doing.

This indicates that she knows the purpose of lotion and the lipstick.

Fix the lipstick on the baby.

I'll give you something to wipe your hands with.

Okay.

What are you going to do with that?

Did we make a mess?

<Yes> Can you clean it up for me?

Very good.

Katie is cleaning up the table Katie, let's put the doll up and we'll do a story.

Would you like to do a story?

Okay, okay.

Katie> We going to let the doll rest a while.

Marie> All right, you're going to hold the doll while we read the story?

Very good.

Okay, let's look at the story.

This is about the three bears.

We've talked about the bears before.

Let's see.

Who is this bear right here.

Katie?

Katie> I don't know.

Marie> Papa bear, <Mama bear> And who is this?

Katie> Baby bear.

Marie> Very good.

That's baby bear.

What is he doing?

Katie> Huh?

Marie> What is he doing?

Katie> I don't know.

He has a hammer.

What do you think he's doing with the hammer?

Katie> He's building another house.

Marie> He's building another house.

Very good.

Look, Katie, let's see what's happening.

What is mama bear doing?

Tell me what Mama Bear is doing.

<Huh?> What is Mama Bear doing?

Katie> I don't know.

Marie> Okay.

That's, that's porridge.

Okay.

What happened there?

The porridge was too...?

<Hot> Good.

It was too hot.

So they went for...?

<A walk> Good.

They went for a walk.

Then what happened?

Katie, tell me what happened.

Katie> Went on to find her... Who's that?

Marie> Goldilocks.

Katie> Here's Goldilocks.

Marie> Yeah.

What is she doing?

Katie> Oh, no.

Marie> Okay.

Katie> Looking out the window.

Marie> Looking out the window.

Then what happened?

When she came in and saw all of the porridge on the table, what the Goldilocks do?

Katie> Eat it.

Marie> She ate the baby bear soup.

I want you to fix that doll up.

You haven't finished with the doll.

I'd like for you to fix the doll up.

I think her hair is a mess.

Would you fix her hair for me?

Okay.

What are you going to do?

What is this?

Tell me what this is.

<Ahhh!> We'll get it.

What is this, Katie?

Katie> A brush.

Marie> Okay.

What are you going to do with the brush?

What are you doing, Katie?

Katie> Brushing my baby's hair.

Marie> Oh, maybe we need to use this.

What is this?

Katie> A bru...comb.

Marie> A comb, what are you going to do wi What are you doing with a comb?

What are you doing, Katie?

Tell me.

Katie> We brushing them.

Marie> You still brushing?

Some of the things that we can observe from listening to Katie is Katie is almost three years old, and she does speak in sentences, which is one of the things we're looking for.

She names objects.

She knows how to use things, like she knows what the brush is for and how to use it.

You're brushing your hair, Good.

Looks nice.

Katie also responds to pictures.

This is one of the things that, we noticed helps in the development of language.

She will look at a picture and she's curious about, objects and pictures.

So this is, this is the way children learn by looking at objects and asking what's happening and Katie> What that cat doing?

Marie> Right, that cat's playing with that boy.

So these are the, curiosity is, natural to children.

As, when, when the parents respond to the child and answer the child's questions, then the child learns language.

Dr.

Freda> The third phase is a standard testing phase.

And in this phase, we administer one of three standard tests of language.

Now these are tests that have been deemed, the measures of what children should know in terms of age equivalence, what should a one year old child be able to do in terms of language?

What should a three year old child be able to do in terms of standard American English dialect.

For the record, when we refer to standard American English dialect, we're talking about the normal language of the school system.

Okay.

So it is the language of the American society.

>> Courtney, look at this picture.

Show me fattest.

Good pointing, Courtney Show me bicyclist.

Good pointing, Courtney.

They.

Good pointing and good listening.

He.

Good pointing.

She.

Good pointing, Courtney.

Dr.

Freda> This study is restricted to rur because most research that has been done in the area of child communication has dealt with urban and White children.

So this study is designed to look at, children of all races, but also to look at children that happen to live in non-metropolitan sectors of the United States, and specifically in South Carolina.

We, have test results to show that speakers who happen to live in rural areas sometimes perform differently than speakers who live in urban areas of the United States on standard measures of achievement, standard measures of language, and etc., so that this is probably one of the first studies of its magnitude to be done on rural dwellers.

And in South Carolina, if you don't live in Spartanburg, Greenville, Florence or Charleston, you are living in a rural area.

At this point, we have, found some of the following.

For instance, that speakers living in rural areas use what we call a shorter sentence length to express themselves.

That means that you translate it.

That means we use fewer words to get a thought across.

Now, if, we take a southern rural dweller and put them in a certain environment and his sentence length is shorter than an urban, his urban counterpart, he then may be considered to be depressed in language productivity.

That's one finding what we're finding is, although a rural dweller has fewer words in his sentence, he may have, the same amount of semantic content in his sentence production as his urban counterpart.

Another finding, is that children who live in rural areas are producing language behaviors that are different from the norm.

It does not mean that their behaviors are inferior, but that maybe they are following a different trend or pattern of acquisition.

I don't want to say any more about that right now, because our statistics and data analysis is not far enough advanced, but we are beginning to show some trends of that.

There is a different developmental pattern.

Semantically, we're finding that speakers that live in rural dwell..., speakers that live in rural areas of the United States may have a greater array of what we call semantic features for vocabulary elements.

Okay.

What does that mean?

That means that if you have a, the word like house, house has one, two, three, four, five, six features, a place to live, a place with a roof.

Negative wet, Positive dry.

Those are features of a word.

We're finding that rural dwellers and southern speakers may have a larger bundle of features than their urban counterparts, just because they see urban lifestyles and urban, ideas and concepts on TV, and they go to New York and come back, but they also have southern experiences and rural experiences that maybe an urban dweller will not have.

Another finding is that perhaps, syntactic development in rural speakers is different, and we're finding in both Black and White race groups that, there is a syntactic what we call groping period, a little bit.

That means, that it, some syntactic structures are learned at a little bit later period of time, by southern and rural dwellers than by urban dwellers.

But it does not mean that syntactic, knowledge is, not as strong.

Syntax deals with the way we put words together.

Car plus go, noun plus verb.

And when I say syntactic groping, I'm simply saying that as children learn language, they have to learn to put a noun plus a verb and then a verb plus an -ING and so forth.

So we're beginning to find that perhaps there are differences in the way rural children learn how to put that -ING, and there may be a t when they learn to put the -ING.

Sometimes what we're finding now is that in the educational system, a kid comes to school, he's a rural speaker, and he does not have that -ING.

or is not marked.

It's not produced in his spontaneous speech.

And people say, well, little Johnny does not know to put - ING on the end of go to make going.

And he's judged as if he's lacking in information, but because his learning styles have been different, or because he's on a slightly different time schedule, then perhaps he really is learning something else, or is just following a normal pattern of acquisition for his linguistic community or for his linguistic environment.

And that's what we hope to do, be able to describe what he does, so that people will be able to measure him by a fair yardstick.

Since we have been on the road, I have observed that there are perhaps some differences in parent stimulation in terms of language, how language is stimulated in a young child between Blacks and Whites, and what I think that, we're going to find or what I think I'm beginning to see is this, that culture, plays a very, very critical role in the end product of the types of language, behaviors that you see in a child so that Black parents are stimulating their children in a certain way that causes them to use certain kinds of language, patterns and behaviors, such as word endings or grammatical structures or sentences and White parents are doing likewise.

And there is a difference.

There tends to be, more similarity and stimulation, across races, as we look at socioeconomic background and whether or not we ascribe to the American dream in other words, I feel that if we were to look at parent stimulation, we find that middle class Blacks and middle class Whites are stimulating their children in very similar ways.

And there is good and bad.

And this is my personal opinion.

There's good and bad in that, in that I see a lot of Black parents stimulating, their children in a very Euro centric manner.

And, while their children are learning language that meets the status quo, they also may be using some very, losing some very important, semantic notions and concepts that are culturally related that they need, you know, for instance, I find that, Black kids no longer know that a spider is a frying pan.

And I find that it's funny that some of the southern rural White children know that a spider is a frying pan.

You know, you look at that in terms of a s so that I'm beginning, you know, to sum it up, I'm saying that I see there is, you know, an emerging of stimulation, patterns as we go up the socioeconomic ladder.

But there is greater disparity as we move down.

We're finding that a lot of the things that we already know, but haven't really acted upon in terms of parent stimulation, if momma has to work, 7 hours or 8 hours a day and does not make a conscious effort, or if she is working below the white collar level or the, the lower, if she's working at the lower blue collar level then she doesn't have the time, or she's too tired when she gets home to read a book or to, you know, stimulate baby and across socioeconomic levels and across racial levels, the kids then are not receiving as much stimulation and their sentence lengths are shorter.

Their word vocabulary variety is less than the standard.

Their grammatical development is a little bit slower.

Okay.

And, you know, it, tends to be fairly consistent across populations.

Listervelt> What are some of the things th to promote, speech development in their children?

Dr.

Freda> Okay, Black parents can do a lot of things to promote speech development.

And the first thing I'd like to say is that a Black parent can stimulate language development without things, without material resources.

The critical thing to do is talk to your child.

If you are brushing your teeth or taking a shower, or giving the kid a bath or cooking a meal talk through what you're doing.

The second thing I would say, and a lot of people may say this is an old, 1960s, carryover concept, but I think Black parents need to get their kids away from TV.

Okay, let me give you one interesting observation that we have come across, in soliciting talk from children and trying to get children to talk.

We raised the question, tell me what you saw in a cartoon on Saturday.

Kids can't recall because the content of cartoons are not as semantically, weighted as they need to be.

Let me translate it.

The cartoons just don't have as much meaning as they need, or they are not as concrete.

Okay, if you take, little Sally in the kitchen and you're making, grits and eggs or are fixing cornflakes and you say, okay, get the cornflakes box down.

I don't care if your kid's 20 months, let them get the box down and tear it open.

Mommy is tearing it open.

Let him dump a few cornflakes on the floor, get the milk and shake it up.

Talking through what you do every day.

Okay, you can take a brown paper bag and just put it over your kid's head and say, what's happening?

You know, I can't find you.

And I think that that's the key thing Black parents need to remember is that we don't have a lot of resources in many cases, and you don't have to have a Fisher-Price toy.

You don't have to have, a lot of material things.

If you talk to your kid and use what you have available, let...the kids stick daddy shoe on and say, "shoe is on" and take the shoe off and say "shoe is off".

Run your fingers through his hair and say, look at your hair.

It's down.

Okay.

Little things like that will stimulate, the child to talk.

And, I think a lot of times we cop out and I can't afford to buy, you know, $2 and 50 cent book, so I can't stimulate my child.

You can read the newspaper to him.

And it doesn't matter if it's last week's newspaper.

That, to me, is very, very important.

I think that, games, games such as, show and tell, the child shows you something, and you ask him to tell you about it.

You can...it's just a number of things, but anything that you can talk about talking through routine activities, everyday life activities are critical to language stimulation.

The other thing is, parents have to learn that when the child comes and says, I'm thinking of my own child.

She's going, "Read it.

Read it.

Read it", five times in the evening.

And I'm really beat right after work.

But, you know, you have to decide, I brought this little being here.

I got to read it five times.

Okay.

And I think that it it boils down to a commitment to put in the time to stimulate, and if you're tired, then, you know, say, I'm tired, go to sleep, then get up that morning and talk through breakfast.

And that really does work.

It's interesting that, if you, back to your question before, when you asked me, what is a critical difference, I think that in some cases, White, parents have, talked to their children a lot more in some cases than Black parents, maybe because they had a little more leisure.

Mommy didn't have to work, and she was there.

And it's, it's, it's nothing really, phenomenal.

It's something very simple, taking the time.

And if I look back to history, we know that our parents spent a lot of time.

It's going back to the family.

Will you take the time to talk over dinner?

It's important that you have dinner together so that people can talk and share, and the child gets a chance to talk.

Don't not let your child spend time with, grandma and grandpa and the aunts and uncles and other children, because they will also take time to talk to the child.

And that is important.

That's important.

Listervelt> The Children in Rural Communic is being funded by a grant from the U.S.

Department of Agriculture.

Now, this preview of an upcoming segment.

When did you first say to yourself, maybe I have something here?

>> I don't know that I've said that yet.

Maybe if I say that I may be afraid to say it, because if I say that, I may lose what I'm after.

And that's continual striving towards becoming a better artist.

I think the things that I do at the moment, I think that they work fairly well.

But I don't think that I've reached the potential that I'm going to reach in order for, for me to say, I may have something here.

Listervelt> Let's take a look at some of the works, you have here.

Let's start with that one over there.

>> The, the one on the left?

<Right.> Okay.

That particular work, is a theme that artists have played with, down through the ages, the Madonna and Child kind of a concept.

And I wanted to deal with the same thing, but from a different perspective.

A different perspective, meaning my way of doing, the work that I do.

And also, when we, when, I think of, of the Madonna and Child, the mother and child.

when I was doing this piece, I was thinking more or less of the fatherless home kind of thing.

I guess it goes back to the feelings that we get when we used to play the dozens, you know, if somebody talked about your mama, you were ready to, you know, pull their head off.

Marie> Our main objective is to have the child talk to us.

We want to see the types of speech the child uses.

And, just what her general conversation level is.

So we talk about things that are interesting to children.

And basically we listen.

Katie> We talking.

Ms.

Gwen Wilson> What you have here is a t audiometer used to test hearing.

All the children seen in the project are scheduled for a hearing evaluation.

Mounted on top of this, diagnostic audiometer is what is called a core system conditioned, oriented...