Social class and preschool language skill: II. semantic mastery of color information

The four-year-old children of Head Start (two-year-classes of 90 for 1969-71 and 72 for 1971-72) performed on a test of perceptual identification approximately as well as four-year-old nursery-school children of parents predominantly of college background. On the other hand, only 28.9% and 19.4% of the children of Head Start, as compared with 87.9% and 90.2% of the children of the nursery-school pointed correctly to all six of the blocks when the examiner named the colors. Also, only 25.6% and 23.6% of those of Head Start, as compared with 81.8% and 76.5% of those of the nursery school, named the colors of all six blocks as they were designated by the examiners. Sex differences and race differences, except in the case of brown, among the children of Head Start were negligible and not significant. Somewhat more children showed semantic mastery for the warn colors, orange and red, than for the cool colors, blue and green. The finding of a deficiency in semantic mastery for such an elementary abstraction as color is highly dissonant with the contention of many students of sociological linguistics that children of poverty, and especially black children of poverty, are without cognitive or linguistic deficit, and that they fail in school only because they use a dialect differing from standard English. The finding is quite consonant with the contention that children of poverty do have a cognitive and linguistic deficit which may, and probably does, derive from the rearing conditions in their homes during the preschool years.