The main purpose of this study is to inventigate the relationship between the socioeconomic level and the child´s ability to imitate and comprehend speech. Thirty two kindergarten children, 16 drawn from lower socio-economic level and another 16 from higher socio-economic level, equally divided by sex, are used as subjects. The speech imitation and speech comprehension tasks were designed to test the subjects´ abilities to control over ten syntactic structures. The results of this study indicated that: (1) the performances of children from higher socio-economic level are superior to that of children from the lower socio-economic level, and the differences between the performances of these groups of children reach significant level, (2) there are no significant differences between the performances of boys and girls, (3) the relationship between the children´s intelligence level and their abilities of speech comprehension, the relationship between the children´s intelligence level and their abilities of speech imitation, the relationship between the children´s abilities of speech comprehension and speech imitation are all at significant level.
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