| The current study involved an experiment that forced categorization of problematic referents among subjects aged two through six. African American and European American children from working and middle-class backgrounds were shown a series of pictures including “normal” referents (e.g. cat or car), and unfamiliar tokens which were combinations thereof (e.g. a clock with a telephone handset or a frog with rabbit ears). The children were not taught labels for the novel referents as in other studies of this type, but were asked to name both the familiar and the novel items. Results revealed that, in addition to differences found at varying age levels, there were also differences in the responses of the children according to socio-economic class; however, race did not appear to be an influential factor. Significantly, variations in linguistic performance across the classes were found in terms of the number of morphemes and the lexical types each group used to label the unfamiliar referents. The middle-class children consistently used a greater number of morphemes and used more sophisticated linguistic strategies (e.g., compounds and descriptive phrases) than their working-class peers. However, the children did not vary on the basic cognitive properties of naming as there were no class differences in terms of dependence on shape or function for labeling. These disparities suggested not that the children from each class had different criteria for categorization, but that there was a difference in their understanding of the requirements of the task itself, a discrepancy often misconstrued as a racially or economically-linked deficit in achievement, rather than a mismatch in cultural expectations for linguistic development. |
