Educability-and-Group-Differences-1973-by-Arthur-Robert-Jensen

paratively least deprived Northern Negroes do better on the nonverbal
tests. (On both verbal and non-verbal tests, the Northern and
Urban Negroes excel over the Southern Negroes, but the disparity
is less on the verbal tests. This appears paradoxical in terms of
verbal-environmental deprivation theories of Negro intelligence.)
Do lower-class Negro children fail to understand white or Negro
middle-class examiners and teachers, and even their own middleclass
schoolmates, because of differences in accent, dialect, and
other aspects of language usage This proposition was examined
in an ingenious experiment by Krauss and Rotter (1968). The
groups they compared were low SES Negro children in Harlem
and middle SES white children in the borough of Queens. Two
age levels were used: 7-year-olds and 12-year-olds. Half the
children in each group acted as speakers and half as listeners.
The speaker’s task was to describe a novel figure presented to
him. The listener’s task was to pick out this figure from a multiplechoice
set of other figures solely on the basis of the speaker’s
description. The novel figures, drawn on cards, were nonrepresentational
and were intentionally made difficult to name, so
that they would elicit a wide variety of verbal descriptions. The
speakers and listeners were paired so as to have every possible
combination of age and race (or SES). (It must be remembered
that race and SES are completely confounded in this experiment.)
The score obtained by each pair of subjects was the number of
figures the listener could correctly identify from the speaker’s
description. The results: the largest contribution to total variance
of scores was the race (or SES) of the listener; the second largest
contribution was the age of the listener. In other words, the 7-
year-old white (middle SES) children did better as listeners than
the 12-year-old Negro (low SES) children. The speaker’s age
was the third largest source of variance. The race of the speaker,
although a significant source of variance, was less than one-tenth
as great as the race of the listener. In both age groups, the rank
order of the mean scores for each of the four possible speakerlistener
combinations were, from highest to lowest:
White speaker/White listener
Negro speaker/White listener
White speaker/Negro listener
Negro speaker/Negro listener
Language Deprivation 279