A total of 102 children (17 from each of the kindergarten, first, and second grades and of two disparate socioeconomic backgrounds) were administered a series of tasks involving verbal recall. The purpose of this testing was to compare the verbal recall ability of children of different ages and socioeconomic status. The verbal material was read to the child. At the completion of each item, the child was asked to recall the verbal material in the order given. Task I consisted of CVC trigrams. Task 2 consisted of nouns. Tasks 3 and 4 consisted of sentences, meaningless and meaningful, respectively. The language skills necessary to perform the tasks increased, theoretically, from Task 1 to Task 4. The hypotheses that children remember more verbal units as language habits can be more fully utilized and that older children remember more units than younger children on the higher level tasks and that there is an interaction between socioeconomic status and performance on the tasks were not confirmed. A prediction of a cumulative deficit between socioeconomic groups with increasing age was rejected. (WD)