LEVELS OF ANALYSIS AND SOCIAL CLASS DIFFERENCES IN LANGUAGE.

Previous studies have not explicitly examined the effect of level of linguistic analysis on correlations observed between language variables and status variables. In the present study, three levels of analysis of a linguistic construction were selected; grammatical form, lexical choice and use of predication type. The corpus was the speech of forty-eight dyads of children (male, female; low, middle socio-economic status; Negro, white) performing three problem- solving tasks. The grammatical form of the construction differentiated between social groups, sexes and races. Lexical choice within the construction differentiated between social groups. Use of the predication type however, seemed to depend primarily on the task itself.