As part of an investigation of ways to increase the linguistic awareness and communication skills of community college students from a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds, a study was conducted to determine if poetry study would enhance the word comprehension sensitivity of bilingual and bidialectal students. The 38 students involved in the study were enrolled in either a poetry class (experimental group) or a social studies class (control group). All students were administered the McGraw-Hill Basic Skills Vocabulary Test as both a pretest and a posttest. Both classes showed significant improvement in word comprehension sensitivity, a result possibly attributable to vocabulary work in each class. However, the findings suggest that students in the poetry class experienced a significant growth in word comprehension sensitivity and in interpersonal affective language usage due to their exposure to metaphoric language that was free of the cultural-specific limitations of surface language matrixes. (Appendixes contain tables of data from the study and information concerning the linguistic functions of the brain and the dimension of depth in language.) (FL)