Gendered speech strategies among children

Jennifer Rothblatt

Sun. 11-1:05 A

This paper is a study of children's use of gendered speech strategies: the use of lexical and grammatical structures that are marked as stereotypically male or female. A quantitative analysis of the different ways of commanding demonstrates that children not only know the speech styles associated with different genders but utilize these difference strategies strategically to achieve their conversational goals. Following Goodwin's (1985, 1988, 1990) call to investigate the ways boys and girls negotiate gender linguistically, I will show that even at the young ages of seven and eight, boys and girls are acquiring intricate communicative competencies.

The data for this study were collected during eight months of field work in a private school in the New England area. Seven- and eight-year old girls and boys in the second grade were tape-recorded during work and play activities in both single-sex and coed dyads. In all, 19 girl-girl, 20 girl-boy, and 8 boy-boy interactions of varying lengths were tape recorded. Fifteen hours of tape recording resulted in a 50,000 word corpus. This study looks specifically at 2,000 directive and permissive tokens: utterances whose intent is to get the other to perform or not perform an action, and utterances intended to procure permission for some desired task. These tokens were coded as linguistic forms of four different strategies, as shown below. A speaker's first strategic choice is between that of a direct command or a mitigated one. Then a speaker can choose to add one or more forms of mitigation and/or intensity to her original choice of a mitigated or unmitigated command.

1. commanding directly Write this.

-direct commands with 'let' Let me write.

-aggravated commands Stop it.

2. commanding with mitigation

-question form Can you write?

-statement form (with modal) We can write this.

-mitigated command with 'let's' Let's write this.

3. added mitigation Just write please.

-tag questions Write it, okay?

4. added intensity WRITE it. (stress)

-repetition Can you write it? Can you write it?

Quantitative analysis of this data shows that children at this young age have already learned gendered speech styles: While boys use more direct commands to get their male partner to do something, girls more often utilize mitigated strategies with a female listener. Both boys and girls are not just aware of the existence of gendered speech patterns but can utilize these speech strategies depending on their conversational environment.

For example, girls show this competence in their use of hyperpolite language. They use longer command utterances (adding tokens of mitigation) to more politely demand that their listener perform an action. Before and after these hyperpolite requests, however, they issue bald commands (without mitigation) to indicate a more immediate necessity to the action, thus showing an ability to switch between strategies. Using both quantitative analysis and qualitative excerpts from my data, I show that young boys and girls skillfully manipulate gendered language strategies in order to achieve their communicative and interactional goals.