The Effect of Culturally Indigenous Word Lists on Recall and Clustering by Lower-class Blacks and Middle-class Whites: An Exploratory Study.

Recall lists were presented to 40 black lower class and 40 white middle class children in this experiment. The purpose of the study was to examine a possible explanation of the relatively poor performance of black and lower class children on tasks requiring abstract learning abilities. It was reasoned that the threshold for the production of abstract mediators necessary for tasks such as concept learning was, in part, a function of the child's familiarity with the verbal stimuli. The lower class black children were fourth, fifth, and sixth graders recruited from an inner city elementary school which was 97% black. The middle class children were fifth and sixth graders from an all white suburban elementary school. The task required learning a serial order or free recall 12 word list to a criterion of two correct, but not necessarily, consecutive trials. Words in one list were category instances rated most familiar by whites. A second list was comprised of instances of the same categories rated most familiar by blacks. Recall and clustering in free recall were hypothesized to be a function of familiarity rather than group membership. The interaction between list familiarity and social class ethnic group membership that was necessary to support the familiarity hypothesis was not obtained on measures of free recall and clustering. Although both groups clustered in free recall better with the white familiar list, a significant three way interaction indicated that clustering on familiar lists increased across trials. An opposite trend occurred on unfamiliar lists. (Author/AM)