Social class and preschool language skill: IV. semantic mastery of shapes

Sociolinguists have contended that children, and especially black children, from families of poverty commonly fail in school not because they have either a cognitive or language deficit but because they have a dialect problem. Being unfamiliar with standard English, they are forced to undertake a double task while learning to read. In order to test the validity of this contention, 54 Head Start and 33 nursery-school children of four years were examined with a test of shape identification. The children of Head Start identified six shapes perceptually by matching them about as well as did the nursery-school children. On the other hand, a much smaller percentage of Head Start than of nursery school named correctly all the shapes as they were indicated by the examiners or indicated correctly all the shapes when they were named by the examiners. Sex differences in semantic mastery of shapes are absent; and among the children of Head Start, race differences in semantic mastery of shapes are also absent. The deficit in semantic mastery for shapes is clearly evident, and demonstrating the existence of such deficits can be useful in guiding compensatory education.