Investigates vocabulary acquisition in the context of joint picture-book reading in mother-infant dyads. Infants aged 17 to 22 months and their mothers, 20 middle-class and 20 lower-class dyads, were observed. In both groups interaction foucused on the eliciting or the provision of information. Results indicate several social class differences in…

The purpose of this study was to investigate class differences in the responses of infants to tape recordings of mothers' and strangers' voices. Subjects were 10-month-old first-born Caucasian girls, 30 from middle class families and 30 from working class families. Stimuli presented through a speaker placed in front of the infant consisted of…

The present study involved the evaluation of the effectiveness of four types of preschool programs on the educational development of lower and middle class children. Middle class children were exposed to "unit" and "cognitive" based preschool programs; lower class children were exposed to "day care" and Montessori…

A study examined the match between the vocabularies of children of different ethnic and socioeconomic status groups and the school vocabulary revealed by readability formulas and word lists. The Spache 1040 and the Dale 769 readability formula word lists were used as indicators of school vocabulary in the early primary grades, and a corpus of talk…