Learning to Speak Like Girls and Boys : A Developmental Study in Gender and Narrative Style

Language, Information and Computation(PACLIC 11), 1996, 449-458 Learning to Speak Like Girls and Boys: A Developmental Study in Gender and Narrative Style Shannon McEwen University of Alberta shannon®parabox. orjp Abstract This study investigated whether or not gender-based differences are evident in the language (North American English) children use to tell a story. An equal number of boys and girls representing 3 developmental stages (7;2, 10;10, and 13;8) were asked to perform a 3 part guided narrative task, which involved telling 3 stories from 2 wordless picture books. The language of the first and third narratives, representing natural and simulated discourses were analyzed. The linguistic variables of interest included lexical diversity, ratio of foregrounded statements to backgrounded ones, mention of the subjective state of either the story characters or the self, and the total length of the narratives. Results showed that differential performance on only two "gendered" factors, percentage of foregrounded utterance usage and mention of subjective state, were the only findings that showed any sensitivity to gender or age. The results for these variables do not support the presence of either expected gender stereotypes or very robust language differences between the sexes. 1. Introduction In the past twenty years interest in the differences between male and female language has spawned a tremendous literature. The largest body of work on language and gender has revolved around Robin Lakoff's 1975 seminal work in which she identified a set of features that she claimed occurred more frequently in women's speech than in men's. Lakoff's claims along with most of the early assertions about gendered language behavior have been prone to methodological and interpretive criticism. Of late, there has been a renewed interest in refuting this early work, due, in part, to the fact that much of it was largely anecdotal, fairly subjective, culture-specific, and has not been replicable. This study investigated the validity of some of these claims with respect to the domain of children's narrative production. The study compares children's production of and metalinguistic awareness about gendered stereotypes in the language they use to tell a story. Although there is a large corpus of language and gender literature, this literature has focused on gendered aspects of adults' language production in conversation. Little research has been conducted into the presence of gender differences in narrative styles, let alone that of children's. The central goal of this study is to provide a description of how boys and girls produce narratives and whether they produce and/or are aware of gender-based differences in their language. It is claimed that by the time children start school, they have already been exposed to gender-differentiated language and are well on their way to forming their own gendered speech patterns. Before age 6, children "have begun to learn to speak differently as a girl or as a boy, how to speak to other girls and boys, and how to speak about them" (Swann 1992:14). According to Swann 1992, how people speak affects how they are perceived by others. Swann proposes …

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