While
Bernstein himself has recently been concerned to explain that his codes
would be better interpreted as sociolinguistic than as linguistic, and that his
studies were always aimed at elucidating group performance differences and
not ones of basic competence (e.g. Bernstein, 1972, 1973), his work has
quite often been taken as support for the language deficiency argument.
Hess and Shipman, for example, see the impact of this work as leading to the
necessary "re-socialization" of the child, for whom "the meaning of deprivation
would thus seem to be a deprivation of meaning" (1968b, p. 103).