A study was conducted to determine whether language provided for the child in discriminating specific criteria helps him significantly to learn to create and hold criteria for sorting, a major difference in the theories of Vygotsky and Piaget. Specifically three questions are investigated: (1) whether 3- to 5-year-old black ghetto children can be moved further along the continuum of sorting ability to sort in two short but intensive training period; (2) which teaching method is more effective--the verbal method in which the child is given practice in sorting with verbal rules and labels supplied by the adult or the nonverbal symbolic gestural method where the child simply imitates adult actions or pantomimes his own; and (3) whether two approaches are differentially effective depending on the level of difficulty of the task, defined here as sorting by color (easiest), form (next difficult), and function (most difficult because most abstract). Ss were 123 black boys and girls from children's centers in Watts. Each child was seen twice individually and provided with a training period and refresher session between pre-testing and post-testing. Both types of training were shown to have a significant effect, but either type was as effective as the other for color and form. Verbal training was more effective for function sorting. Boys performed better with nonverbal training, and girls performed better with verbal training. (KM)