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

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.