Speech Discrimination in Black and White Children

The effect of dialect on speech discrimination scores of black and white adolescents was investigated. Ten black and ten white tenth grade students were selected as subjects. Six public school teachers, three black and three white, read the Kindergarten PB Word Lists which served as the stimuli for the speech discrimination tests. These words were played back to each student at three different listening levels. The students were requested to write the words they heard. Results showed that both black and white students did significantly better in their performances on speech discrimination tests when white teachers served as speakers. There was no significant difference between the performance of black and white students when white teachers were speakers. However, when black teachers served as speakers, black students performed significantly better than white students on the discrimination tests at the two lowest intensity levels.