NEGRO CHILDREN’S SPEECH: SOME SOCIAL CLASS DIFFERENCES IN WORD PREDICTABILITY*

Language samples of junior high school aged Negro girls of low and middle socio-economic classes were subjected to word predictability procedures undertaken by additional students from the same two populations. Results indicated that the middle class students could readily approximate the language of the middle and low class samples, but the lower class students did significantly more poorly in approximating the language of the middle class students, although they performed as well as the middle class students in approximating language in samples from students of their same social status. BACKGROUND Recently, following an earlier suggestion by Taylor (1954), it has been re-emphasized (Clark, Williams, and Tannenbaum, 1965) that word predictability techniques are useful for gauging the correspondence of language habits between groups of people. One approach, often referred to as cloze procedure, involves deleting every n-th (usually every fifth) word in a language transcript, then having a decoder population attempt the replacement of the deleted items. To the extent that they are successfu