Social class differences in children's comprehension of adult language

Twenty-five mothers of all social class levels were asked to tell, as if to a 6-year-old child, the stories suggested by several cartoon picture sequences. These stories, tape-recorded, were played to a hundred 6-year-old white male children of high and low social class levels, who were then asked standard comprehension questions about their content. Analysis of the comprehension scores revealed significant main effects of social class of adult speaker and of social class of child listener but no interaction of these two variables. Further analysis of transcriptions of the stories revealed two characteristics, namely the factual information included in the stories and the use of nonstandard grammar, which seemed to mediate the effects of both social class and speaker IQ on comprehension.