| Sumario: | Investigators have reported differences in communication experience for low and middle socioeconomic class children. Using the Wiener and Mehrabian model of communication, it was hypothesized and found in 2 studies that low socioeconomic class children respond, in a social reinforcement paradigm, to positive and negative words only when these words are tonally inflected (with congruent inflection), while middle socioeconomic class children respond equally well to words alone and words with congruent tonal inflection. Further, as hypothesized, middle socioeconomic class children respond only minimally to positive word-negative tone and negative word-positive tone conditions; contrary to hypothesis, low socioeconomic class children respond to the word and not the tone in these incongruent word-tone pairings.
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