Social class and preschool language skill: V. Cognitive and semantic mastery of number

This study was done to test the validity of two hypotheses of why children, and especially black children, of families of the poverty sector commonly fail in school. Sociologists deny for them either a cognitive or a linguistic deficit, and blame their failures on having to master the unfamiliar dialect of standard English while learning to read. The authors, on the other hand, blame the failures on inadequacies of early preschool experience that result in such deficits as one in semantic mastery of various elementary abstractions. In 1970-1971, 87 four-year-old students (58 black and 29 white) of Head Start and 33 of nursery school were examined with a five part test of number identification. In 1971-1972, the study was repeated with 69 four-year-olds of Head Start and 46 of the nursery school. A much smaller percentage of Head Start than of nursery school identify the numbers of blocks from 2 through 4 by either the heard or spoken mode of number identification. For numbers 5 and 6, most children of both classes fail. The evidence for a semantic deficit for number is very strong. The evidence indicates also a deficit in the span of apprehension and suggests the existence of class differences in the power of examiner demands for heard and for spoken identification to elicit the counting strategy. Evidence of sex differences in semantic mastery of number is absent, and among Head Start children, race differences lack statistical significance. These findings are highly dissonant with the contention of the sociolinguists that no cognitive or linguistic deficits exist and uncovering them can be helpful in guiding compensatory education.