Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy ETDs

Publication Date

7-11-1974

Abstract

This is a study of the acquisition by children of one aspect of communicative competence, the ability to decide that certain kinds of language are more appropriate to speakers of one sex than the other. It was first established that adults had such competence, and then shown how children came to approximate it. The study used as subjects 122 white, native English speaking adults and 122 children in first, third, and sixth grades, from a middle class Albuquerque neighborhood. All were presented with a written instrument on which they chose the likely sex of the speaker of sentences containing the variables "adorable," "oh dear," "my goodness," ''won't you please," "just," "so," "very," tag question, "I'll be damned," "damn it," "damn" + adjective, and command. Adults were exposed to eight additional variables. Ten subjects at each age level were interviewed and asked to explain the choices they made. Adults were able to identify the sex-appropriateness of the variables tested, to isolate the variables as carriers of social meaning, to respond to linguistic form rather than topic as the factor which signals sex-of­speaker meaning, to explain how particular sex role traits can be signalled linguistically, and to use a single rule to interpret all categorically rule-based female language and separate rules to interpret all profanity. Women were better than men at two of the tasks: responding on the basis of form, and knowing the sex­appropriateness of the variables. An initial study of fifty adult subjects, using an open-ended instrument, revealed that sex of speaker is a prominent sociolinguistic variable in interpretations even when people are not directed to attend to this variable. A study using another 62 subjects showed that people associated the female and male language with appropriate female and male attributes, the attributes being divided not only according to sex but also according to social value. The children studied seemed to be acquiring this competence gradually. The first grade children assigned language to the sex of the speaker on the basis of topic rather than form. The only two forms carrying sex-of­speaker meaning were "adorable" and "damn it." With increased age, there was an increased ability to attend to form, to note the forms which were sex-linked, and to justify that linkage by matching role attributes (rather than sex-typed activities) to features or connotations of language. Younger children did not have sociolinguistic rules for all the variables. They did not use one umbrella rule to interpret female categorical language, although older children did. Third and sixth graders, but not adults, used one rule to interpret all profanity. Two patterns of acquisition emerged. One pertained to variables for which clichés exist ("men swear, but ladies don't," etc.). This pattern showed first a learning of individual items, then rule overgeneralization, and finally, rule differentiation at adulthood. The second pattern pertained to variables for which no clichés exist; in this case, there was a steady increase, through adulthood, in the number of subjects noting the sex-linkage of the variables concerned. Young boys, due to social pressure, surpassed girls in their ability to know that there are linguistic correlates of sex roles. By sixth grade, girls had caught up and were on their way to becoming women who would be more sensitive to the sex-linkage of linguistic forms. The study discusses implications for the women's movement and for education, along with suggestions for future research. The sexist social structure is seen as the root of the language differentiation which enables people to possess this particular aspect of communicative competence.

Document Type

Dissertation

Language

English

Degree Name

Certificate in Curriculum and Instruction

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy

First Committee Member (Chair)

Bernard Spolsky

Second Committee Member

Mari-Luci Jaramillo

Third Committee Member

Lewis Aloysius Dahmen

Fourth Committee Member

Robert Harold White

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