A Vocabulary Study of Children in a Foreign Industrial Community

study clinic and has referred to her for examination and study large numbers of children from foreign, industrial communities. It is her custom to include the Stanford Binet in a minimum examination schedule. In dealing with the child of foreign nativity or foreign parentage it is clearly necessary to evaluate very carefully mental age scores based on tests involving language. The particular problem approached by this study is the determination of what can be expected of the normal child of foreign parentage and industrial background when the Stanford Binet is used. The obvious approach to this problem would be the testing of fairly large nationality groups with the complete, individual Stanford examination. Time for research through this clinic is limited, and such a large project was viewed as impractical for the present. Since in dealing with the foreign groups the chief variable factor is presumably the language factor, it seemed likely that some light might be thrown on the problem of expected performance on the Stanford Revision by the use of the vocabulary test. It was therefore decided to approach the larger problem by giving the oral, individual vocabulary test to the children of an entire elementary school system located in a largely foreign industrial community, to see what were the tentative norms obtained by such an investigation.1