Young black children's sentence comprehension skills: a comparison of performance in standard English and Jamaican Creole

Abstract

A sample of 22 black children attending an inner city nursery school were assessed on a test of sentence comprehension in two forms: (a) Standard English and (b) Jamaican Creole. Order of presentation of test forms was balanced. The results showed that this sample of young black children performed significantly better on the Creole version than on the Standard English version. This was particularly pronounced for certain sentence structures.