ABSTRACT
These are judgments made on speech, but the standards of the judgment are derived from conceptions about the written and not the spoken form of the language. In other words, there is a double miscarriage of judgment. Firstly, social value-judgments are expressed, inappropriately, in grammatical terms. Second, one mode of language, speech, is judged, inappropriately, in terms of another mode of language, writing. The criticism which is most often made of spoken language is that it is marred by incomplete sentences, hesitations, pauses, repetitions, false starts, and so on. Speech is richer in linguistic forms and in expressive devices than writing. Spontaneous speech is often characterized by greater complexity of structure, a great variety of information-units, and variety in the internal structure of information-units. The child's situation, and his relation to the institution of speech therapy, can serve as a convenient symbol of the relation between the users of the spoken and the users of the written mode of language.
