Kid Categories

Abstract

The current study compares the productivity (number of responses) and the typical responses to taxonomic and slot-filler prompts in 39 African American children from low-income backgrounds and a diverse group of 21 children from middle-income backgrounds. The authors tested the hypothesis that socioeconomic status would exert a global influence on productivity and typicality responses such that children from middle-income environments would generate higher productivity rates and more sophisticated typical responses. They found support for this hypothesis only in categories that appear to be related to exposure to formal contexts. Several categories that reflect basic life experiences displayed similar rates of productivity and typical responses across socioeconomic groups. Findings from this study have implications for the assessment of semantic knowledge in elementary-school-age children from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds.