Abstract
In French, and other gender marked languages, there are two ways to interpret a grammatical masculine form when used to refer to social roles or occupations [e.g., les magiciens (the magiciansmasculine)]. It can refer to a group composed of only men (specific use of the masculine form), or one composed of both women and men (generic use). Studies of adults revealed that the rule that masculine forms can be interpreted as inclusive of either gender is not readily applied. To gain a better understanding of the processes shaping this phenomenon, we present a follow-up study (N = 52) to Lévy et al. (2016) to explore how French-speaking kindergarten children (3–5 years of age) resolve the semantic ambiguity of the grammatical masculine form when presented with role or occupation nouns. In a paradigm where participants’ gazes were monitored, children were presented with pictures of a pair of two boys and a pair of one girl and one boy and were prompted to Look at the [role nounmasculinepluralform]. First, the results suggest a stereotype effect in that children more strongly directed their gaze toward the boy-boy picture for stereotypical male role nouns, but toward the girl-boy picture for stereotypical female role nouns. Second, in the non-stereotypical/neutral condition we did not find an indication of any own-sex preference (as in Lévy et al., 2016), but of an influence of the role nouns’ grammatical gender, in that children more strongly directed their gaze toward boy-boy pictures than toward girl-boy pictures. We suggest that a specific interpretation of masculine forms might already start to emerge between 3 and 5 years of age, while gender stereotypes are still activated.
Highlights
Research on the representation of gender in language has mainly focused on adults, yet focusing on children could document the onset of the intricate interaction between information provided by language structure, and by information transmitted through cultural processes in forming gender representations.In the present study, we examine the role that grammatical gender plays when French-speaking kindergarten children process role nouns in the masculine form
When prompted with a role noun in the masculine form, our participants may have dominantly considered it as a generic form, which would indicate a different pattern than that in younger children (e.g., Lévy et al, 2016), and different than that in adolescents (e.g., Vervecken et al, 2015), and adults (e.g., Gygax et al, 2012)
In their experiment in French, Lévy et al (2016) showed that children aged 2–3 were mainly driven by stereotypes when processing role nouns presented in the masculine grammatical form
Summary
Research on the representation of gender in language has mainly focused on adults, yet focusing on children could document the onset of the intricate interaction between information provided by language structure, and by information transmitted through cultural processes in forming gender representations.In the present study, we examine the role that grammatical gender plays when French-speaking kindergarten children process role nouns in the masculine form. Research on adults (e.g., Gygax et al, 2012) and adolescents (Chatard et al, 2005; Vervecken et al, 2015) has revealed, that representations of role nouns in the masculine plural form are frequently male-biased, which has been interpreted as indicating a gender specific interpretation of the form It remains unclear at what stage of language acquisition this bias unfolds, as even though some research has been dedicated to French-speaking children’s early understanding of grammatical gender in general (e.g., Van Heugten and Shi, 2009; Royle and Valois, 2010; Cyr and Shi, 2013), little research has been dedicated to the grammatical gender of role nouns (see Lévy et al, 2016, for an overview)
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