Social class, defective hearing, and language

Linguistic behavior of lower class normal-hearing children is less developed than that of higher class children. This study tests the hypothesis that the same applies to hearing defective (h.d.) children. Ninety-six h.d. children were tested with a linguistic ability test. The h.d. chiren scored lower than the higher class h.d. children. Within their own class the difference between the higher class h.d. and normal-hearing children was larger than that between lower class h.d. and normla-hearing children.