Communication, Language and the Ability to Learn

Alan Challoner MA MChS

The more complete the information that a person is able to communicate to someone he trusts,
the more he himself becomes able to dwell on it, to understand it and to see its implications.
John Bowlby, 1991.

Vocabulary and the general adequacy and completeness of speech vary by socioeconomic class. Speech is poorer in form and articulation, less in amount, and less precise
for children at lower socio-economic levels than for those at higher social levels (see Irwin,
1948,1).
Another important consideration is that the sooner a child develops adequate language,
the sooner he is able to understand the intentions and requirements of his parents, and to
respond accordingly. This verbal comprehension helps a child understand the difference
between his now behaviour and his next. A better discrimination of his mothers
intentions leads to more efficient learning. 2
One of the early ways of predicting the future intelligence of children, tested as infants, was
the measurement of their speech sounds.3 Children reared with meagre adult attention,
and who are relatively isolated or who live in institutions, are handicapped even more in
their speech than in their general IQ level. This type of handicap has been shown to exist as
early as two months of age. Children who, at elementary school ages, test at the learning
disability or borderline level started talking later than children who measured normal or
bright. At least during the early years of their lives, twins and triplets test lower in both
speech and intelligence than singletons, although much of this lag is overcome by school
age. Their speech seems to be even more handicapped than can be accounted for by
their somewhat lower intelligence test scores.
Pathak, et al., have studied the influence of socialisation, parental deprivation and family
psychiatric history on the speech development of 267 institutionalized learning disabled
children aged ten years. The subjects were matched on sex, locality and IQ level as well as
on age. The indications from the study are that where speech development takes place it
has an effective quality that depends upon the social environment in which the therapy is
located. Where there were lack of adequate components such as poor environment and
small family size, the child became discouraged and self-centred. There was no relation
found between speech development and the family psychiatric history.4 Skuse takes the
view that the evidence is not clear-cut regarding the possibility that some exposure to
language and communication is essential at an early age in order to facilitate later
acquisition of speech.5
While the evidence is not entirely clear-cut, children who are bilingual during the pre-school
yearsthat is, typically, whose homes use one language while their eventual schools use a
different one test lower than monoglots. Although social class may be involved, since
children from such homes are rather more frequently from lower than from upper-class
homes [USA], the effect seems greater than can be accounted for by social class alone.
Work on the perceptual development of language in infants has been reviewed by Cooper
& Aslin.6 They have looked at the use of auditory information during early language
processing, and have found evidence that indicates that infants actively process sounds,
particularly those with acoustic attributes of their native language. It has been established
that infants as young as four months can identify their colloquial speech when presented
within a mixture of other accented speech and other languages. The mothers voice
registers characteristically with the infant, and with the fetus from about 20 weeks after
conception. This possibly is related to the musical components of speech. These are:

metrical structure or rhythm, the melodic structure, and the timbre or voice quality. Infants
pre-natal experience with maternal speech may determine the early post-natal perceptual
salience of a specific mothers speech, motherese speech, and native speech. Infants
sensitivity to suprasegmental aspects of speech may dictate much of what they attend to,
whilst features of infantSuprasegmental Analysis
directed speech seem to
Communication through speech relies on not just words
draw their attention to the
but how they are spoken. Speech is bound to the time
speaker and elicit positive
continuum, and we must receive it as it happens, moment
affective responses.
by moment. In order to understand it we search its form,
Following the use of brain
examining segments in a search for a structure that is
scans, it has been discovered already laid down or is developing in our brains. The
why it is easier for children to
segments of spoken language are the vowels and
learn a second language
consonants that combine to form syllables, words and
than it is for adults.
sentences.
When we articulate these segments our
If the second language is
pronunciation varies, in accordance with our tone of
learned at the same time as
voice.
the primary, it is stored in the
Components of a sound-based language
same region of the brain; in
Phonemes
The individual sound units, whose
the part of the frontal lobe
concatenation,
in
a
particular
order, produces the basic
known as Brocas area. If the
sounds
of
language
and
dialect
called morphemes.
second language is learned
Certain
sounds
cause
changes
in
the
meaning
of a word or
later, it is still stored in Brocas
phrase,
whilst
others
do
not.
In
English
there
are
some 40
area, but separated from the
such sounds that are seen as important units, and these are
first language. It seems that
called phonemes or segmental phonemes.
learning the primary
language singly sets up
neural circuits in a specific
area, and these will not
accommodate a laterlearned language.
These findings also suggest
that the age of language
acquisition may be a
significant factor in
determining how this part of
the brain is organised. Infants
start by being able to
recognise equally, all
relevant sounds, but as they
learn their native tongue, the
way it is represented in
Brocas area becomes fixed.

Morphemes
The smallest meaningful units of a
word, whose combination creates one. In order to learn
grammar a child must segment the speech he hears into
morphemes, as these are the basic units of grammatical
rules. There are smaller units called segmental phonemes
and these form the basic sounds of language and dialect.
These are put together into syllables to form morphemes.
Syntax
The admissible combinations of
words in phrases and sentences (called grammar, in
popular usage).
Lexicon
The collection of all words in a given
language. Each lexical entry includes all information with
morphological or syntactic ramifications but does not
include conceptual knowledge.
Semantics
The meanings that correspond to all
lexical items and to all possible sentences.

Prosody
The vocal intonation that can modify
Social class seems to be
the literal meaning of words and sentences.
directly related to
The linking of sentences such that
vocabulary level; yet children Discourse
they
constitute
a
meaningful
whole.
from some middle-class
homes have been shown to
have low vocabularies, while
those from some lower-class homes have relatively good vocabularies. One author 7
provides evidence indicating why there are such exceptions (at the same time presenting
data to show that the childs language status and his socio-economic status correlate
somewhere between 0.78 and 0.86, depending on which of two statistical techniques is
used).
The twenty-one high-scorers in this study of language status by Milner, which consisted of
forty-two first-graders, came from homes ranging from upper-lower to lower-upper, this
latter being the highest social class included in the study. They were distinguished as a

group from the twenty-one low-scorers by such factors as eating breakfast and dinner with
their families and engaging in conversation during those times. Their discipline inclined
more toward guidance and prohibition, whereas physical discipline was more
characteristic for the low-scoring children. High-scorers were more frequently expected to
look after their own possessions and/or room and received more praise and affection.
More high than low-scorers had been exposed to baby sitters, and they went to bed later,
frequently as late as ten p.m. Low-scorers were bribed with small gifts of money more
frequently than high-scorers. The high-scorers, as might be expected, possessed more
books and indicated that their mothers and fathers read to them more frequently. More of
the low-scorers said they could not recall ever feeling really happy and were less frequently
able to recall instances or situations where they had felt happy. Low-scorers more
frequently possessed, as reading material, only funny books and /or school books.
Such factors as those listed above are, of course, strongly related to social class; but where
there are variations in language within a social class, it is plausible that such variables as
parental conversation, attention, praise, and so on, could produce the difference between
the low and the high-scorers.
DeBaryshe, et al., formulated a system for measuring parental beliefs about reading to their
children. Their Parent Reading Belief Inventory was completed by 155 parents of children
aged between 25 and 65 months. The Inventorys structure formed a single factor, and
high scores on this indicated a belief by the parent that was consistent with current theories
of language acquisition and emergent literacy. When parent income and education were
controlled, inventory scores remained significantly correlated in respect to:

self-report measures of parents own book-reading habits;

childrens interest in books;

childrens exposure to joint book-reading activities.

The scores also showed a significant partial correlation with the observed frequency (during
book-reading sessions) of:

parental questions;

and responsiveness to childrens speech8

The hypothesis that parental reinforcement builds language is supported by an unpublished

study of Irwins (1960). He secured the co-operation of a large group of mothers whose
husbands were mostly skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled labourers. It could be expected
that such mothers did little reading to their children at any age and probably none in the
first year or so of their babies lives. He persuaded fifty-five mothers to read aloud to their
children for at least ten minutes a day from the time they were one year old. The
participation in the study of another, control group of mothers was invited by offers to
check on the development of their babies. Otherwise no change was made in the
interaction between them and their children.
Irwin measured the youngsters speech development regularly and found great differences
in all phases of speech by the time the children were twenty months of age. These
differences appeared to be highly significant statistically. This study is especially
provocative when the relations that have been found between speech and intelligence
are considered. Irwin reports the experimental mothers amazement and chagrined
amusement: You asked us to read ten minutes a day, some exclaimed, but I cant get
away from that kid. He wants me to read to him all the time.
There are projects being developed to foster the development of early literacy amongst
low-income and working-class families. One such took place in Australia from 1987 to
1992. In this project workers assisted families by:

reading regularly with them;

discussing issues around the implementation of the programme such as the

management of home-school relations when reaching out to disadvantaged families;

and the effects of the project on childrens literacy competence.9

Another investigation examined the connections between attachment and the frequency
of reading in mother-infant dyads. A subject group of 18 children who were read to

infrequently were matched to a control group of 18 children who were read to daily. The
mean age of the subjects was 3.4 years. The outcome established that mothers in dyads
that used reading frequently did not need to put pressure on their children to focus on a set
reading task as often as did those mothers of the subject group. Of the mothers whose
attachment to their child was less secure it was found that they:

spent less time reading to their child;

had more troublesome episodes during the set reading, than did the control mothers.

The researchers also presented a view that the security of the mother-child attachment was
related to the mothers representation of their relationship with their parents.10
A longitudinal study of pre-school literacy experience and later reading achievement was
carried out by Scarborough, et al., with 56 middle-class children and their 112 biological
parents.11
The children were first observed during their pre-school years and then again at the end of
Grade 2. The intermediate set intervals were at ages of: 30 months; 36 months; 42 months;
and 48 months; at which time the children were tested and the mothers completed a
questionnaire. In this the parents were asked about:

frequencies of adult reading;

parent-child reading;

and the childs solitary book activities;

in the home.
The parental responses were compared for three groups set according to the parents own
reading skills and their childrens reading achievement in grade 2. The outcome showed
that the eventual poor readers (22) had less frequent early literacy-related experiences
than did those who became better readers (34).
n
Vernon believes that the main function of public language is similar to that of infant
speech, which is to express feeling and enhance social solidarity with the listener. It
emphasises the present rather than the past or the future. It is inefficient for tracing causal
relations, and incapable of providing a medium for Piagets formal, operational type of
thinking. So, although lower social class pupils can accomplish a fair amount of
mechanical learning, they are much more handicapped in attempting academic
secondary/high school work. The middle-class child is familiar with both codes, and indeed
uses public language quite largely in inter-personal contacts. But the lower social classes
are relatively incapable of formal speech. Again the middle-class child becomes
accustomed to attending to long speech sequences, whereas the lower social class child,
in a noisy, incoherent environment, if anything learns not to attend.12.
Theoretical contributions related to the rle played by social class and language as factors
predisposing individuals to think in a concrete manner have been made by Basil Bernstein
(195813, 195914, 196015). Bernstein has attempted, in these papers, to show a relationship
between two forms of linguistic expression and the manner in which relationships to objects
are established. He points to the common, public or street language that is commonly
used by the unskilled and semi-skilled in society. According to Bernstein, this form of
language-use facilitates, thinking of a descriptive order and sensitivity to a particular form
of social interaction (Bernstein, Idem, 1959, pp., 311). Because of this sensitivity to content,
only the simplest logical implications or boundaries of the structure will be cognized, i.e.,
certain aspects of an object will not register as meaningful cues; or, if they do, the verbal
response will be inadequately determined (Bernstein, Idem, 1958, pp., 169]. On the other
hand, a formal language, the use of which is common to the middle class,
facilitates the verbal elaboration of subjective intent, sensitivity to the implications of
separateness, and difference, and points to the possibilities inherent in a complex conceptual
hierarchy for the organization of experience. (Bernstein, Idem, 1960, pp., 271)

The implications of this analysis are significant. Users of the public language (mainly the
lower class) are predisposed to,

low levels of conceptualisation an orientation to a low order of causality, a disinterest in

processes, a preference to be aroused by and respond to that which is immediately given
rather than to the implications of a matrix of relationships. (Bernstein, Idem, 1959, pp., 318)

McCandless considers that the empirical support of this position is weak, consisting of two
minor investigations that show that the non-verbal intelligence of lower-class males in
England is much higher than their verbal intelligence. He believes that if Bernsteins analysis
is correct, it could be used to afford insight into the conceptual rigidity of some persons with
mental handicap.
Further evidence related to this point has been provided by Mia L. Kellmer Pringle and her
associates16, 17. In extensive investigations of the effects of early deprivation on the
language development of children, she found that children who had resided in residential
nursery schools and had experienced deprivation, were handicapped in the formal
aspects of language (Idem 1958, pp., 285). The nursery school children lacked the ability
for verbalising fantasy and for using speech in making social relationships with
contemporaries (Idem 1958, pp., 286). Pringle believes that the results of her investigations
support Goldfarbss assertion that deprivation is more detrimental to a childs language
development than to any other aspect of his personality. This evidence might be used to
account for the low performance of culturally deprived children on verbal intelligence tests
and their high levels of ability on performance type tests.
n
Language handicap then, is a prime factor in two respects:
FIRSTLY, bilingualism of a young child who moves to a foreign country with inadequate
mastery of the new language may exert a retarding influence upon intellectual
development and may under certain conditions affect personality development adversely
(Anastasi, 18; Arsenian, 19; Darcy, 20). A common pattern in the homes of immigrants is that
the child speaks one language at home and another in school, so that his knowledge of
each language is limited to certain types of situations. Inadequate facility with the
language of the school interferes with the acquisition of basic concepts, intellectual skills,
and information.
The frustration engendered by scholastic difficulties may in turn lead to discouragement
and general dislike of school. Such reactions have been noted for example by Anastasi
and Cordova21. In the case of certain groups, moreover, the childs foreign language
background may be perceived by himself and his associates as a symbol of minority group
status and may thereby augment any emotional maladjustment arising from such status
(Spoerl22).
Another view is that adequate instruction in both languages can help to eliminate some of
the problems noted above. Willig contends that IQ scores for groups using different prime
languages are influenced by the way that they use vocabulary. Genetic components of
scores in IQ tests taken through the medium of a second language are heavily loaded with
the components of that language. She points out that IQ tests rely for their outcome on
language facility rather than intelligence. Thus children who are working in the
environment of a second language are not in the optimal conditions for measuring their
abilities.23
SECONDLY, and with far more overall effect, is the way in which language is used and
learned by a child from birth onwards. Literacy can only come from the acquisition of
language and both develop sequentially from the earliest beginnings of watching and
listening to the mature forms used in a literate adulthood. Children who are at risk in various
ways may have difficulties with the acquisition of language and literacy and early
intervention is appropriate.24
This important aspect of development and intellectual stimulation is and needs to be the
subject of separate studies. Briefly, at this juncture, it is worth mentioning that imitation is
one of the best learning strategies that babies have. Almost uniquely amongst mammals
the brain cells at birth in the human are only remotely connected. Thus brain development
and neural connections occur predominantly as a result of the babies learning
experiences. Crying is not only its key to survival but also to learning. Unless someone

(usually the mother) responds adequately and effectively to crying the baby will not survive
and may well suffer in terms of learning.
It can recognise its mothers voice from three days old, and from four days can tell the
difference between its native language and one that is different. Sounds can be heard
and remembered by the fetus from about 20 weeks after conception. By eight weeks it
prefers the sound of its native language to that of all others.
At three weeks of age the babys most effective muscles are those of its eyes. During the
pre-speech phase when a baby points to an object it is not asking for it but it wants to
know what it is called. Babies have a need to add to their growing knowledge a vital
component the ability to name and classify everything around them. The more words
that a child knows the faster he will learn new ones.
To have a child and not to help it to acquire good language skills and develop them to
their full potential is like building a house that no one ever occupies or a ship that never
leaves port.
Social disadvantage can preclude proper development in pre-school children. The areas
that are especially vulnerable are:

cognitive development

psycho-motor development

learning

and emotional development.

Mohan has found that lower class children are more anxious and less motivated. He
believes that school can be a source of reparation by developing family counselling
sessions, including rle playing, socio-drama and psycho-drama. This type of support will
help to counteract the loss of earlier developmental abilities.25
Whereas by 12 months a secure infant is in open two-way communication with his mother
by means of gesture and expression that each partner interprets correctly, an insecure
infant is not. Instead of turning to his mother to discover whether or not it is safe to
approach and explore the toys and the visitor, and to indicate to her how he is feeling in
the strange and changing situation, and how he would like her to respond, he tends to
keep himself to himself, or else to give contradictory signals. Moreover, as the longitudinal
studies conducted respectively by Mary Main in California and the Grossmanns in Bavaria
show, these two-way patterns of communication tend to persist. Thus, at six years of age,
mother-child pairs who were communicating freely and effectively at 12 months are
continuing to do so, in contrast to the limited and inadequate communication patterns
that are found to be still characteristic of pairs in which the child was earlier assessed as
insecurely attached. 26

Parenting Issues
Non-organic (endogenous) learning and behavioural difficulties have their origins in
environmental consequences. Schubert, et al., have concluded that unwantedness by
parents, especially the mother, may be a factor in increasing the likelihood of learning and
behavioural difficulties as well as other social problems. Psychiatric abnormality was also
found to have an increased occurrence in children whose sibling was less than two years
older.27
Wanted children quite clearly seem to stand a better chance of surviving unscathed during
the process of development. This chance improves even more if parents too are healthy,
and if their developmental process was satisfactory and produced a happy childhood.
However those who are at risk are not lost, and the purposes of the National Institute of
Child Health and Human Development [USA] are designed in part to promote the interests
of such children. Alexander gives some indication of the breadth of work accomplished by
this comparatively new institute. It includes the promoting of the birth of healthy babies,

trying to assure that babies born are wanted, and that all children reach adulthood free of
illness and disability with the possibility of achieving their potential.28
Mother-infant interactions are therefore important to the success of child-rearing. Schaefer
observed 321 low-income mothers whilst they were interacting with their babies at home
when the child was four months old and again at twelve months. These were then later
related to teacher observations when the child was in kindergarten. Through factor
analysis the dimension of positive interaction and gentle-sensitive against punitive-irritable
were identified at the earlier assessments. Positive interaction was significantly correlated
with child academic competence, but the less reliable and less stable dimension of gentlesensitive was not significantly correlated with child behaviour during kindergarten.29
A cultural change of recent times has been the large number of children being raised by a
single parent. This has reached the political agenda in the UK as some views have been
expressed that this situation may at times be entered into deliberately. A government
report into ethnic minorities states that 54 per cent of young Afro-Caribbeans have no
father at home. This compares with 33 per cent of Africans, 16 per cent of whites, 11 per
cent of Chinese, and less than 10 per cent of Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indians. The
report suggests that the rejection of marriage by West Indians reflects the culture of their
countries of origin.30
One of the psychological issues here is the potential orchestration of gender by (a)
parent(s). Bem who considers herself to be an empirical scientist has written extensively on
this subject. Indeed she has both supported and negated the prospect of androgyny
being a solution in child-rearing.31
Feminists have put forward proposals for what they see as solutions to sex inequality, but
Bem finds that these are less than adequate. She says that she has never been persuaded
that sex equality means an identical profile of characteristics between men and women.32
As a mother herself, Bem considers that sex-rle stereotyping has a debilitating effect and
she seeks to:
free the human personality from the restricting prison of sex-rles stereotyping and to develop
a conception of mental health which is free from culturally imposed definitions of masculinity
and femininity.

In this respect she lays down her

conditions for such a state. These
are:
SEXUAL PREFERENCE should be
considered to be consistent with
any concept of mental health or
ideal personality.

Androgyny
The use of this description in the childrearing context implies confirmation of gender in
respect of primary sexual characteristics, but making
no distinctions in the usual areas of dress,
appearance, activities and employment.

SEX-RLE IDENTITY.
It should be practical and possible for people to exhibit naturally,
both masculine and feminine characteristics of personality, but because men and women
have been locked into their respective sex-rles, women have been afraid to express
preferences or anger, to trust their own judgement and to take control of situations. Men
have been afraid to cry, to touch one another, or to own up to fears or weaknesses. An
adult should be able to relate to other human beings as people. Limiting their response is
unnecessarily destructive of human potential. The traditional situation has produced for
women, dependency and self-denial; and for men, arrogance and exploitation,
untempered by a sufficient concern for others.
Bems prescription for a liberated sexual identity is stated thus:

Let sexual preferences be ignored;

Let sex-rles be abolished; and

Let gender move from figure to ground.

Bem sees a problem here of course and that is that the concept of androgyny could be
seen as replacing masculine or feminine with masculine and feminine. This would load
them with two potential sources of inadequacy. She goes on to point out that the concept
of androgyny is a dangerous one from the perspective of gender-schema theory because

it is based on the presumption that there is a masculine and feminine in everyone, such that
femininity and masculinity are an independent and palpable reality and are not just
cognitive constructs derived from gender-schematic processing. Human behaviours and
personality attributes should no longer be linked with gender, and society should stop
projecting gender into situations irrelevant to genital characteristics.
Turning to her alternative strategy she discusses the three main theories through which
concepts of gender and sexuality have developed.
PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY was organised by Freud and places the childs identification with the
same sex parent as the primary mechanism whereby children become sex-typed, an
identification that results from the childs discovery of genital sex differences.
SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY emphasises the rewards and punishments that children receive for
sex-appropriate and sex-inappropriate behaviour.
COGNITIVE-DEVELOPMENT THEORY focuses almost exclusively on the child as the primary agent of
his or her own sex-rle socialization. It assumes that sex-typing follows naturally and
inevitably from universal principles of cognitive development.
As an alternative to these, Bem proposes a Gender-Schema Theory. This enables sex-typing
to be mediated by the childs own cognitive processing, but deriving it from the sexdifferentiated practices of the social community. This establishes it as a learned
phenomenon and as such it will be neither inevitable nor immutable.
In considering how to raise gender-aschematic children, Bem sees the major option as
trying to undermine the dominant ideology before it can itself do the undermining. She
says that feminist parents cannot just ignore gender in their child-rearing as they might
prefer to do, because society will then have a free rein to teach its own lessons on gender
as it does with most other children. She sees instead what she calls a process of inoculating
their children against gender-schematic processing. This comprises:

enabling children to learn about sex differences, initially without also learning the
cultures sex-linked associative network by simultaneously retarding their childrens
knowledge of the cultural correlates of sex and advancing their childrens knowledge
of the biological correlates of sex;

parents providing alternative schemata that their children can use to interpret the
cultures sex-linked associative network when they do learn it. This avoids the pitfall of
just learning gender-schematic processing somewhat later than their more traditional
peers.

What then remains is just the biological correlates of sex; anatomy and reproduction. These
are then known as the only definitive attributes of females and males. Bem sees all this as
being on a theoretical basis only at the present time. She would like to see children raised
with neither a gender-schema nor a sexism-schema. She regretfully submits that the
present alternative is between a child becoming gender-schematic (sex-typed) or sexismschematic (feminist). Of these she prefers the latter.
The question that might be asked here is: Does Bems theory interfere with adequate
mothering? Rossi has suggested that there is a biologically based potential for a greater
investment in a child by its mother than by its father, at least during its early months of life.
She also questions whether fathers will participate in child-care on an equal basis if the are
affected by their own negative developmental experiences in this area.33,34,35
Others have determined that mothering is identified as a female rle by reason of training
and identification. From this theory it is deduced that girls learn to be prepared for
motherhood just as they learn other sex-appropriate behaviour.
Chodorow declares that the process of child-care as practised by mothers is responsible for
daughters who wish to become mothers themselves. Thus girls emerge from childhood with
a capacity for the empathy required, already built into their self-image in a way that boys
do not.36 Her view is that because mothers are the same gender as their daughters and
have themselves been girls, mothers of daughters tend to experience their infant daughters
as less separate from themselves than they do their infant sons.37

As a consequence of this finding, Rossi suggests that this pattern of early socialisation is a
less sharply differentiated self in girls than in boys, and so in women there is a greater
sensitivity to others, greater capacity for empathy, and a greater field dependency than in
men. (Idem, 1987)
Chodorows view has been criticised as being a retrospective analysis made from patients
and therefore is not representative. Another theory is that the salary structure of past years
has made it economically sound for the male to be employed and the female to take care
of the children.
An early but nevertheless telling comment was made by Balint when she wrote:
it remains self-evident that the interests of mother and child are identical, and it is the
generally acknowledged measure of the goodness or badness of the mother how far she
really feels this identity of interests.38

Chodorow challenges this concept stating that it will persist as long as (only) women
mother, and that it is one major reason why equal parenting is a necessary component of
sexual equality.39 She places the origins of the differentiation of the sexes into the realms of
object relations, suggesting that it occurs during the emergence of separateness. She
suggests that:
our own sense of differentiation, of separateness from others, as well as our psychological
and cultural experience and interpretation of gender or sexual difference, are created
through psychological, social, and cultural processes, and through relational experiences.
We can only understand gender difference, and human distinctness and separation,
relationally and situationally, as part of a system of asymmetrical social relationships
embedded in inequalities of power, in which we grow up as selves, and as women and men.
Our experience and perception of gender are processual; they are produced
developmentally and in our daily social and cultural lives. (Idem, 1987)

Rossi takes Chodorow to task because she believes psychoanalytic theory is not the best
vehicle for understanding normal behaviour. Chodorow states that the strength of
psychoanalysis is as an interpretative theory and not as a behavioural science. Rossi
counters this when she writes: I cannot accept the view that, Pathology reflects in
exaggerated form, differences in what are in fact normal tendencies . Rossi adds that
pathology can involve not just exaggerated normal tendencies but actual reversals from
normal tendencies. She also makes some telling comments about her terminology, stating
that, Only if one has learned to translate her terminology can a reader understand her
meaning . Thus she finds Chodorows use of clinical cases, without the comparison to
controls, not to be a suitable design to enable an understanding of normal developmental
processes.

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