| Abstract: | Recent findings of ethnographic research conducted by Heath (1983) indicate that some children, particularly nonmainstream children, may respond to questions analogically—that is, by describing the object or event they have experienced or been exposed to in terms of their own experience, as opposed to responding referentially (i.e., by providing a specific name or label). The purpose of this study was to analyze the relative frequency of analogical responses to questions in three groups: 15 inner-city black preschoolers, 15 inner-city white preschoolers, and 15 mainstream white preschoolers. Data were gathered from the language portion of a developmental screening battery that included question-answering tasks from the Blank Preschool Language Assessment Instrument (Blank, Rose, & Berlin 1978). Analysis of the data indicated that (a) there was a significant difference in the number of analogical responses between black and white children regardless of whether the white children were inner-city or mainstream and (b) the frequency of use of analogical responses to questions was highest among the black children participating in the study. |
