CHILDREN'S COMPREHENSION OF TEACHER AND PEER SPEECH

Abstract

In order to evaluate (a) the extent to which information is successfully communicated from teachers to pupils of various social backgrounds and (b) the degree of effective communication among children from diferent social backgrounds, 64 first-grade and 127 fifth-grade public school children were requested to restore words deleted from samples of teachers' speech and the speech of children of diverse social backgrounds. Half the fifth-grade children heard the material on tapes; the balance responded to visual administration of the tasks. Generally, no significant differences were obtained in performance between first-grade SES I and SES III children. Differences related to social class and sex became salient at fifth grade. Controlling IQ markedly reduced the obtained number of SES differences, but increased sex differences. Although Negro-white differences were virtually absent, Negro and lower-class children were penalized less by speech samples derived from children of similar social backgrounds. Fifth-grade girls' superiority to boys on this language task was revealed to be a function of social-class level. Lower-class girls were superior in performance to lower-class boys on the language-comprehension tasks of this study, whereas there were no differences in performance between middle-class boys and girls.