Gordon, A. M. (1984). Adequacy of responses given by low-income and middle-income kindergarten children in structured adult–child conversations. Developmental Psychology, 20(5), 881-892.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.20.5.881
Examined structured adult–child conversations for the adequacy of responses given by 3 groups of kindergarten children: a daycare group of 15 Black low-income children who had been enrolled in a preschool intervention program, a nonintervention group of 15 Black low-income children who had not participated in the program, and 15 middle-income children of whom 13% were Black. The adult's conversational turns included 3 types of cognitively complex initiations (instructions, simple conditionals, and counterfactuals). Results show reliably lower response adequacy for the nonintervention group in comparison with the other 2 groups for all 3 types of initiations, thus demonstrating a facilitating effect of daycare intervention. There was some negative association between response adequacy and length of response, with middle-income Ss giving the shortest responses to adult initiations. (35 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)