As part of the development of a battery of tests to determine proficiency in black standard and nonstandard speech, the authors developed a two-part test consisting of 20 items designed to evoke a response by means of verbal and pictorial cues. Each cue was supposed to elicit a specific grammatical construction characteristic of either black nonstandard English or black standard English. The tests were recorded on tape and administered by six black experimenters to 27 third graders (22 black, 5 non-black; 14 male, 13 female) and 32 sixth graders (26 black, six non-black; 17 male, 15 female). Two treatments (implicit vs. explicit) were used. In the implicit treatment the expectation of a response in standard or nonstandard speech was conveyed only by the verbal cue used for each item. In the explicit treatment the difference between standard and nonstandard speech and the expectation regarding the answer were explained to the subject before each part of the test. Both parts of the test were scored according to whether the subject used the grammatical construction that the item was supposed to elicit or whether the subject's response as a whole was appropriate to the language of the stimulus. In addition, balance scores, scored positively for imbalance in favor of nonstandard speech, were established by subtracting scores on the standard test from those on the nonstandard. Only the scores achieved by the Black subjects were included in the main analysis of the test results. In general the scores were heavily weighted in facor of standard over non-non-standard--i.e., the students produced more appropriate responses to standard cues than to nonstandard cues. (Author/JM)