Describes the procedures used in a study designed to examine differences in nonstandard grammatical usage among and between Negro and white working-class informants in the community of Alexandria, Virginia. (Author/FB)

Describes the attitudes of Black and White, male and female, middle- and lower-class adolescents and preadolescents in response to tape-recorded samples of standard English and Black English. (HOD)

Article investigated the hypothesis that Caucasian subjects supply significantly more standard English, and Negro subjects supply significantly more predictable nonstandard English endings to present, plural, possessive, and time extension words, and that differences are obtained regardless of the standard or nonstandard English mode of…

Compares the oral reading performance of nonstandard-English speaking Black third grade students, bidialectal students, and standard-English speaking students. Results showed that the oral reading patterns of the nonstandard-English speakers did not affect their comprehension of the material read. (FL)

Examined imitative recall for sentences conforming to the grammatical rules of standard English versus those suggested for nonstandard (black) English. Subjects included black and white third and fourth grade children grouped according to socioeconomic background and attendance at either racially segregated or intergrated schools. (SDH)

This study explores the relationship between Black English skills acquired outside school and figurative language comprehension in standard English. Path analysis confirmed the direct influence of "sounding" skill (a Black language ability) on figurative language, comprehension for Black youth. Only general verbal ability affected White…

The purpose of this study was to examine how two different speech varieties used during an oral reading and recall task influenced primary grade teachers' evaluations of reading comprehension and how teachers' attitudes toward Black English related to their evaluations. (Author/PN)

Two experiments investigated the relationship between cultural schemata and reading comprehension. Subjects for the first experiment were 186 eighth grade students who attended one of five schools--two predominately black inner-city schools, two predominately white working class area schools, and a predominately white agricultural area school.…

This study investigated the roles of both belief similarity and dialect style on white subjects' attitudes and nonverbal behaviors toward black or white people in a face to face interaction. The experimental design consisted of six cells defined by two levels of belief similarity crossed by three levels of the race and dialect manipulations (white…

The Test of Language Development--Intermediate (TOLD-I) was administered to 26 learning disabled (LD) and 26 nonLD elementary aged black children. The subjects were matched for age, IQ, and class placement. Statistically significant differences were found between the two groups on four of the five subtests of the TOLD-I. The data also were…

This study attempted to answer five question: do black inner-city students at the first grade level associate Vernacular Black English (VBE) with black speakers and Standard English (SE) with white speakers? Do black inner-city students prefer VBE or SE? Is there a significant relationship between the self-concept of these students and their…

This experiment deals with a test of auditory discrimination between standard Black English and nonstandard Black English. The test consists of two sections, one emphasizing phonological variables and the other emphasizing grammatical variables. It was administered to 83 black and 71 white children who were second, fourth, and sixth graders in…

Second-grade Black children who speak Black English (BE) were compared with Black and White age peers who speak Standard English (SE) on auditory sound blending and word recognition tasks presented in both BE and SE form. BE speakers were bidialectal and performed best on SE materials in a school situation. (Author/RD)

This paper serves as an introduction to a group of papers produced by the Classroom Interaction Project of the Center for Research in Social Behavior at the University of Missouri in Columbia. This project has been chiefly concerned with ascertaining if black-ghetto and white-suburban classrooms use language differently and, if so, in what ways.…