Investigates group differences in the use of language to request information in the conversational discourse of 39 children of 4-5 years. Membership in an ethnic group, social class, and situation affected speakers' displays of this function. (RJC)

This investigation dealt with the relationship between productive cultural involvement, racial group, membership, and personality among lower-class young men in the United States. While found, racial differences seem secondary to those reflecting different degrees of productive involvement. (Author)

This study of 40 working- and middle-class preschoolers indicates that Black children less frequently use internal state words to express their thoughts, feelings, and desires in the classroom than they do at home, or than White children do both at home and in school. (Author/SJL)

The research reported here focuses on one aspect of the communicative environment, namely vocabulary. The central question motivating this research was whether there are social class and ethnic group differences in the vocabulary used in the home and in the school situation. A corpus of talk was searched for the use of words from four standardized…

A research project combining ethnographic and experimental methods is currently underway to assess whether minority groups use language in ways that put their children at a disadvantage in school. The project, which focuses on social, cognitive, and educational consequences of different patterns of language function and use, has involved…