ABSTRACT
The role of language in the performance of African-American children has been of concern in the social sciences for several decades. This chapter explores how language preserves the affective relationships that grow out of early mother-infant interactions. Even though language-socialization research is cataloging some distinctive relationships between language components and specific cultural experiences, the persistently poor performance of African-American children in school settings continues to stimulate studies that use a Black-White comparative, experimental model. The documentation of the natural language skills of African-American children and the maintenance mechanism by which those skills are supported is integral to an understanding of their language-related difficulties in school settings. The similarities in the early form and content of language development for the working-class African-American children and mainstream and working-class Euro-American children are striking. Importantly, these findings provide further documentation of a limited amount of evidence in the literature.
