THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Children develop & test their tentative notions (hyp's) about the meaning of words & the structure of sentences chiefly through verbal interaction with more verbally mature speakers. The learning of new verbal responses can be facilitated by a relative invariance in the environment which more readily permits the acquisition of a bond between a word embedded in a sentence (the verbal context) & its referent (the object which is to be paired with the word) which is usually surrounded by a multitude of extraneous features. This is more difficult in Lc homes which are more crowded & more transient in their inhabitants than are Me homes. The acquisition of labels is the result of the interaction of 2 major variables: (1) the stability of the word-referent relationship & (2) the f & type of verbal interaction (corrective feedback) available during language acquisition. A greater amount of corrective feedback is required as the stability (invariance) of the wordreferent relationship decreases. The protocols of approximately 40 4-yr old, Lc Negro children tested with a receptive labeling task, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), indicate their failure with 3 clusters of items: action words, words related to Ru living, & words whose referents are rare in Lc homes. The paucity of verbal interaction between children & adults in Lc homes may explain these findings. The Concept Sorting test was used to study category formation in 1st & 5th grade, white & Negro, Lc & Mc.children. Me (Negro) children tended to produce category labels more often than their Lc peers,who were more inclined to focus on non-essential attributes. These findings indicate that the quality & amount of corrective feedback given by the actively participating adult determines the breadth of generalization & the precision of discrimination which the child relies upon while learning multiple referents. AA.