On Writing

As a linguist working in the education field I sometimes feel like an agent behind enemy lines. In the eternal struggle between prescriptive and descriptive grammarians, the battle lines are pretty well established. The linguists get the spoken word and all the (nonstandard) dialects, and the English teachers rule the realm of writing with an iron fist. There are border skirmishes now and again, but the armistice line generally holds.

Working with dyslexic children provides many opportunities to see how language works (or doesn't, in some cases). Writing, for example- I have often seen big difference between the way some children speak and the way they write.

I have had students spontaneously produce sentences like "There is trees" and "The water rushing." These are not just ungrammatical in the bespectacled English teacher sense, but also in the linguistic sense of not possible English sentences. Neither of the students who wrote these sentences would have (I'm fairly confident) spoken them. Both had considerable difficulty determining that they were ungrammatical, even when I read the sentences back to them.

The most interesting case, however, was that of a dyslexic girl with autism whom I worked with. AB was by any measure a fluent speaker, having on one occasion recounted a long story about a family vacation in which she even gave me directions to a restaurant I am to visit if I ever go to Connecticut. One day, she decided to write a story for me. Clutching her pencil in a vice grip, she started the page in first intense concentration, then frustration. I kept the story:

Dog. Dog. Cat. Dog. Cat. Cat. Tree.

 And well, it goes on like that for a while. AB, who could vividly tell me a story, was unable to write me one, or even produce a marginally grammatical sentence (as with the two above).

I have no explanation for this effect. Could the parts of the brain that process language for speech output be different than those that export it to the hands (and thence to pen or keyboard)? Why would dyslexia (which is now almost universally understood to be a phonological awareness disorder) affect syntax? I would love to hear from anyone out there with experience on these subjects.