Social Class Differences in the Speech of Six Year Old Hungarian Children

Abstract

This paper reports on a Hungarian study of social class differences in the speech of 65 six year old children from s primary schools in Budapest. Speech samples were collected from stories which were elicited by a series of pictures. Five quantitative indices of context-dependence were constructed; and, on the basis of these indices, context-dependence was related to the child's own social background and to the social composition of the school. It was found that the speech of `advantaged' children was structurally more complex and less context-dependent than the speech of `disadvantaged' children. Overall, the study demonstrates the applicability of the concept of context-dependence in a non-English speaking country, and provides yet another demonstration of the influence of social class differences on speech codes.