Preschool boys' and girls' language use in pretend play

Abstract

Despite the rapid growth of research on communicative competence in children, we have little information as yet about the similarities and differences between the speech styles of boys and girls. This lack of information is somewhat surprising, since authors of most studies carefully include half boys and half girls. However, the use of gender as a variable for data analysis is less common than one might imagine. In this chapter, I shall present data from a study of language use in children's pretend play, discuss these data in relation to other studies of communicative competence, and offer suggestions about possible bases for the sex differences observed. The data come from a larger study that is being carried out by me and two colleagues, Jane Goldman at the University of Connecticut and Christine Chaille at the University of Oregon. The main purpose of that study is to look at the development of the ability of preschool children to coordinate their play behavior (see Sachs, Goldman, Chaille, and Seewald, 1980; Sachs, Goldman, and Chaille, 1984, 1985; Chaille, Goldman, and Sachs, 1983). I concentrate here on whether the boys and girls spoke differently in the situation in which we observed them.