Spurred by the impetus of the antipoverty programs of the 1960's, social science researchers and human service practitioners have focused upon the need for effective communication with the American urban poor. To this end, both groups have attempted to describe the context within which the urban poor receive and process messages in the hopes of…

The study reported here was an attempt to systematically manipulate certain factors which might be responsible for the poor communicational performance of lower socioeconomic status children. The major questions raised were: Can differences in task difficulty, perceptual characteristics of the task, and task instructions attenuate or eliminate…