This study investigated the performance of three groups of educationally advantaged and educationally disadvantaged eighth grade boys on each of five measures of cognitive, linguistic, and intellectual functioning. The five measures included: (1) general intelligence, (2) field dependence assessed by an embedded-figures task, (3) level of abstraction, (4) abstract vs. concrete linguistic style, and (5) concrete conceptualization. The advantaged and disadvantaged groups were selected from white rural, black urban, and white suburban populations. Some of the results of the study were (1) that the educationally disadvantaged groups did not differ significantly on the first three performance measures; (2) each performance measure significantly differentiated between the advantaged and disadvantaged groups, with the advantaged making higher scores on all measures; (3) the significantly higher level of general intelligence shown by the advantaged group was not predicted; (4) there was an extreme degree of linguistic concreteness shown by the combined disadvantaged groups; and (5) the ability to transfer concretely based concepts was not consistently related to any other performance measure. (Author/DI)