Young children's immediate memory of word classes in relation to social class

Abstract

To investigate immediate recall of nouns, verbs, and function words, using a word analogue to the digit-span memory test, two studies were carried out, one with 60 children in the kindergarten, first and second grades and the other with 60 pre-kindergarten children. Half of the subjects in each set lived in a lower class neighborhood, the other half in a middle class area. In each study, lower class children, in comparison with middle class children, showed a significantly greater recall of verbs and nouns than of function words. The results are consistent with the proposal of Basil Bernstein that children from poverty environments use relatively fewer function words when compared with their peers from more affluent homes.