An Annotated Bibliography of Journal Articles

Poverty and socioeconomic status.

“…The most persistent theme that runs throughout the poverty literature, particularly from the 1960s and early 1970s, is that the language skills of lower-class (particularly African American) children are deficient in significant areas. For example, disadvantaged children have less access to and proficiency with formal, elaborated language (e.g., vocabulary, syntactic structure); are more prone to use nonstandard English; are more deficient in auditory discrimination skills; and are less able to understand word meanings (see reviews by Williams, 1970;Williams & Naremore, 1970). Although many deficiencies have been identified from this research, some researchers have argued that a large portion of the language characteristics of lower-class children could be more appropriately interpreted as different but not deficient (Baratz, 1970;Labov, 1970).…”