Lilspeak vs. age-appropriate language
Jun. 29th, 2005 11:05 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
shandra.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
multiplicity_archivesThis is probably beating a dead horse a little but I don't really like to see people feel their kids are being negated by a discussion about Lilspeak.
So I just wanted to distinguish a bit between bad spelling/grammar and Lilspeak, apart from the rant. And say why we decided to discourage our kids from learning or using it.
Children acquire language in a fairly specific pattern. This article from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders shows some of them. People who have worked in special ed (I did, although not at a very high level) know that quite often it's possible to identify a physical or neurological learning difficulty simply by looking at kids' written mistakes. Mistakes that transpose (flip) letters are one kind, mistakes that get the wrong sounds are another kind, etc. Not all spelling mistakes have a reason - that's why you get *really weird* spellings sometimes, that aren't phonetic - but that in itself demonstrates a clear stage that the child is at.
Why Lilspeak is controversial is that often the way it is written on the 'net doesn't follow the rules of language acquisition. It's not just a case of delayed development - someone in a multiple system writing like they're 5 when they're 7 - it's that the errors common in Lilspeak are not commonly made child grammatical errors. Also, as people have noted, quite often the errors are superficial - phonetic spelling, for example - while the underlying verb/tense/clause construction is fine (and quite advanced).
Now the reasons for this could be a zillion - overlapping adult consciousnesses, absorbing social/grammar/spelling rules on the net (kids are good at this - in fact that's how they absorb language), whatever. In a way Lilspeak is more like a pidgin language - a strange hybrid between how children "sound" inside and the adults hearing it. Functionally kids who use it have learned a new language.
But why it can be controversial is that anyone that is aware of how kids acquire language will not perceive Lilspeak as a child language. It may make them more suspicious and less accepting of system kids. It may in rare cases open a system child who /is/ trying to communicate to ridicule or skepticism that isn't necessary. And as a group concern (which I don't worry about too much, but it is there) it can make the typing look "faked" and "not really a kid" to anyone who's trying to prove that for whatever reason.
You could say to your average person Lilspeak probably looks the same as actual poor spelling, but I myself think anyone sensitive to language patterns will pick up on the bad-spelling-but-complex-sentences dissonance, on some level. And we have generally found that if people feel something is 'off' they get closed-minded pretty fast.
As long as one's system kids only talk to other multiple systems' kids, it won't be an issue if that's the dialect they choose to acquire and learn - so no harm, no foul in that sense. But if one's looking at a broader audience for system kids to communicate with, it may cause problems.
I don't think being aware of this is elite or snobby. I don't even think it means "down with Lilspeak!" Neither does it mean "down with bad spelling!"
I'm just saying, sometimes the Lilspeak hides the realness of the child rather than communicating that reality. And hopefully that information can be useful to people in making their own decisions about it.
So I just wanted to distinguish a bit between bad spelling/grammar and Lilspeak, apart from the rant. And say why we decided to discourage our kids from learning or using it.
Children acquire language in a fairly specific pattern. This article from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders shows some of them. People who have worked in special ed (I did, although not at a very high level) know that quite often it's possible to identify a physical or neurological learning difficulty simply by looking at kids' written mistakes. Mistakes that transpose (flip) letters are one kind, mistakes that get the wrong sounds are another kind, etc. Not all spelling mistakes have a reason - that's why you get *really weird* spellings sometimes, that aren't phonetic - but that in itself demonstrates a clear stage that the child is at.
Why Lilspeak is controversial is that often the way it is written on the 'net doesn't follow the rules of language acquisition. It's not just a case of delayed development - someone in a multiple system writing like they're 5 when they're 7 - it's that the errors common in Lilspeak are not commonly made child grammatical errors. Also, as people have noted, quite often the errors are superficial - phonetic spelling, for example - while the underlying verb/tense/clause construction is fine (and quite advanced).
Now the reasons for this could be a zillion - overlapping adult consciousnesses, absorbing social/grammar/spelling rules on the net (kids are good at this - in fact that's how they absorb language), whatever. In a way Lilspeak is more like a pidgin language - a strange hybrid between how children "sound" inside and the adults hearing it. Functionally kids who use it have learned a new language.
But why it can be controversial is that anyone that is aware of how kids acquire language will not perceive Lilspeak as a child language. It may make them more suspicious and less accepting of system kids. It may in rare cases open a system child who /is/ trying to communicate to ridicule or skepticism that isn't necessary. And as a group concern (which I don't worry about too much, but it is there) it can make the typing look "faked" and "not really a kid" to anyone who's trying to prove that for whatever reason.
You could say to your average person Lilspeak probably looks the same as actual poor spelling, but I myself think anyone sensitive to language patterns will pick up on the bad-spelling-but-complex-sentences dissonance, on some level. And we have generally found that if people feel something is 'off' they get closed-minded pretty fast.
As long as one's system kids only talk to other multiple systems' kids, it won't be an issue if that's the dialect they choose to acquire and learn - so no harm, no foul in that sense. But if one's looking at a broader audience for system kids to communicate with, it may cause problems.
I don't think being aware of this is elite or snobby. I don't even think it means "down with Lilspeak!" Neither does it mean "down with bad spelling!"
I'm just saying, sometimes the Lilspeak hides the realness of the child rather than communicating that reality. And hopefully that information can be useful to people in making their own decisions about it.
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Re: what about typing? And non-standard people?
Date: 2005-07-02 01:43 am (UTC)It's kind of fascinating, language acquisition - although I think there certainly can and I'm sure are exceptions, it's such an important *human* thing that it appears to all extents and purposes to be pretty hard wired provided there are other humans around at all.
But I don't know about any studies around writing vs. typind, and I think it's a good distinction.
We used quite a bit of typing in the learning centre where I worked. I don't remember there being a lot of double letters in that, but I wasn't at the time looking for anything to do with lilspeak so I can't say for sure.
What *was* really common was leaving letters out, especially vowels (I remember that 'cause we would try to emphasize that every syllable has a vowel, which is one way to check). That's totally not-phonetic whereas a lot of lilspeak is *extremely* phonetic. I think that's one reason why, although we hadn't thought it through much, when we came across lilspeak on the 'net, we adults were generally a bit suspicious.
To the broader question - I wouldn't try to evaluate a specific system on their typing ability no matter what. And I do believe that people in different systems can display different abilities and disabilities - but I also think that if only the kids type one way and only the adults type another, that is probably more the acquisition of Lilspeak as a dialect than something like a learning difficulty or non-standard acquisition.
In other words there are so many systems out there where the adults type fine and the kids type lilspeak that I don't think specific other factors are probably all that relevant. Not scientific though. :)
Just on a personal note, one reason I got into all this before, actually, being selves-aware is that we had a really bad accident when our body was 14 and we became learning disabled in a very odd way.
We got studied because it was so specific - the brain damage could be traced to a specific area and so learning disability researchers were all over it. For us it created a real division in our life because certain things that were easy before are difficult or close to impossible now.
(For example, if I take off my rings, I cannot tell my left from my right and can't figure out which hand to hold the pen in, despite still being strongly right-handed; if I end up with the pen in the wrong hand I can't figure out why it doesn't work, except for telling myself "if it doesn't work /change hands/ you dummy"... see, wierd stuff. And it's not just me, it's across our system as far as I know. :))
So for me personally I have a slight bias that there is a biological basis for a learning difficulty.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-02 03:46 pm (UTC)autistic spectrium disorders tend to shoe up in pragmatic sematic langauge use probelms.
we (in the system) all have the same learning problems so they maust be biological for us too, we seem to have been born with them although the audidtory processing disorder was made worse by a perforated ear drum and them lots of recurrent infections when we where tiny and just learning to listen to languauge/speak. We have probelms with left and right too - but not as bad as you describe. I don't like totally understand how some people in a system can have a learning difficulty and not others but we've been wondering if it has to do with useing different neural pathways?
no subject
Date: 2005-07-04 01:52 am (UTC)I personally believe different people in a system do use different neural pathways, but I also think if the neurons don't exist at all (as in our case, with the brain damage) they can't be accessed. Maybe a biologically younger system could have compensated, but we couldn't, except to go through the process of learning how to work around things.
It might depend on the exact reason for a difficulty. Sort of like - it can be the equipment that's not working, and then it just wouldn't work, or it can be signal that's scrambled, and that could be more specific to an individual. But who knows really.