pronoun errors of gender

[Aliyah MORGENSTERN]

Dear Laura,

I can only report anecdotal errors in French data.
We haven't made any specific study on this topic in our data of French typical children (the Paris corpus) but I do have anecdotical evidence of pronoun and determiner "errors" in gender. You might not consider it as being the same issue (in the case of determiner, mostly grammatical gender, in the case of pronouns referential or personal gender). I must say that grammatical gender errors in French exist and are quite impressive when we find them and also fun to analyze since the developmental pattern could be similar to past tense with irregular verbs in English ("la fleur" feminine flower instead of masculine, "un poule" - masculine chicken instead of feminine).

As far as personal pronouns are concerned, we have noticed that children mostly produce non standard "proto-uses" of "proto-forms" when they are in the filler syllable stage with fillers closer to "il" instead of "elle" or the reverse... When the full pronoun stage is reached with no more fillers, there are still some odd gender reversals...
Older children (3 or 4) get mixed up when they are trying to refer to two different characters or persons in the same speech turn: "elle la mange" (she eats her) speaking of the wolf eating the little girl, instead of "IL la mange" (he eats her) with the added complexity of subject and object and semantic roles of eater and "eatee"...

As far as I know these errors are not consistent at all during the time that they occur. I think it is interesting to study whether and when they are repaired by adults.

I'm sorry if this is really too vague...and of course since we only have spontaneous data, the occurrences will be really scarce, we could only make qualitative analyses. But I'm sure we have them. And actually, I myself continue to make that type of "error". I can remember a whole data session when I kept referring to the child as she when it was a he... Maybe under the influence of scientific papers on language acquisition. I'm sure I've heard adults get mixed up as well. I think there are a lot of different factors (cognitive overload, semantic complexity, number of referents, prototypical gender for certain roles or functions which influence certain automatisms...).

As far as the psychotic and autistic children I have worked with are concerned, I have not filmed them, so can only speak from direct experience with no data, but the errors were much more systematic when they existed.

I think you could compare this phenomenon to pronominal reversal (3rd or 2nd person instead of first person) in typical and autistic children. There is more literature on that, especially in English and it might inspire you, but you have probably already thought of it.

Best,
Aliyah 




Aliyah Morgenstern
Professor of Linguistics
Sorbonne Nouvelle University


Le 16 juin 2012 à 23:31, Laura Snow a écrit :

> Dear all,
>  
> I’m trying to determine whether typically developing children ever make errors in pronoun gender (e.g., reverse “he” and “she”), and if so,
>  
> 1.     at what point in their language development (and for how long) do these errors occur?
> 2.     are these errors consistent or intermittent during the time that they occur?
> 3.     Do the errors occur mainly in cases of long-distance reference or also with relatively simple utterances (e.g., pointing to a girl and saying, “He has it”)
> 
> In my clinical experiences, I have seen many children with autism who make errors in pronoun gender, and many kids with language disorders (as well as younger, typically developing kids) who make errors in pronoun case (e.g., “her have it”).  I can’t say that I’ve ever seen a child make a pronoun gender error who did NOT have autism, but I’m having trouble finding anything in the literature to back up that blanket statement.
>  
> I’m mainly interested in finding formal studies of children learning English, but evidence that is anecdotal and/or from other languages would also be useful!
>  
>  
> Laura Snow, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
> University of Washington
> Center on Human Development and Disability
> Seattle, WA
>  
> 
> -- 
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Info-CHILDES" group.
> To post to this group, send email to info-childes at googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Info-CHILDES" group.
To post to this group, send email to info-childes at googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/info-childes/attachments/20120617/3924ff0a/attachment.htm>