pronoun errors of gender

[Sarita Eisenberg]

Laura
We looked at errors produced by 3-year-olds with typical language on a 
picture description task and did find gender errors.
The reference is:
Eisenberg, S., Guo, L., & Germezi, M., How grammatical are three-year-olds? 
Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 43, 36-52, January 2012.
Sarita Eisenberg

On Saturday, June 16, 2012 6:31:22 PM UTC-4, Esther wrote:
>
> 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
>  
>
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