Social class and preschool language skill. I. Introduction.

This series of studies concerns the relative validity of two explanations of why children of parents of poverty do poorly in school. Both explanations assume that nearly all children have the genetic potential to learn what the schools attempt to teach. One holds that children, and especially the black children, of poverty are in no way deficient in cognitive and linguistic skills. They fail merely because they enter school with a dialect differing from standard English. This complicates the task of learning to read in standard English. The other view holds that the rearing conditions in families of poverty limit the number and variety of objects and places and action models with which the poor child becomes acquainted during his infancy and preschool years, resulting in a cognitive deficit. These conditions also hamper the poor child's acquisition of phonemic symbols for objects and places and the relationships among them, resulting in a deficit in semantic mastery. This series of studies employs several strategies of investigation. This paper indicates their nature. It also describes in some detail the economic and educational characteristics of the parents of the two sets of children examined.