Social class and communication style: The ability of middle and working class five year olds to encode and decode abstract stimuli

Abstract

This study investigated whether five year old children would show similar social class differences in coding style to those found in Heider's (1971) study of ten year old children. Fifty‐six middle and working class children aged five were asked to encode an abstract stimulus from an array of six similar items, so that another child present could identify the target item using only the information given by the encoder. Middle class children were found to make significantly greater use of a part‐descriptive coding style, whereas working class children made a significantly greater use of a whole‐inferential style; the findings were congruent with those of Heider on ten year olds. These differences were found to hold for a subsample of children matched on verbal intelligence, and, furthermore, the use of the various coding styles showed no significant correlation with verbal intelligence. The origins and implications of these social class preferences in coding style are discussed.