Digest for info-childes at googlegroups.com - 3 Messages in 2 Topics

Sun Jun 17 16:41:51 UTC 2012

The pronoun gender confusion issue in English can probably be settled fairly quickly by looking at the CHILDES data base, but i want to offer a caveat: the nominative he/she pair can also be subject to phonological errors if the child hasn't yet learned to control the 'esh' sound.
For what it's worth, English-speaking agrammatic aphasics, who usually have articulation problems, have he/she errors, but I don't know if there are documented gender errors on possessive  (his/her) or accusative (him/her) forms; I suspect that the closeness in sound of the he/she pair makes them more vulnerable to error.
Lise Menn

On Jun 17, 2012, at 6:55 AM, <info-childes at googlegroups.com<mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com>> <info-childes at googlegroups.com<mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com>> wrote:

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 *   pronoun errors in gender<x-msg://22/#group_thread_0> [1 Update]
 *   pronoun errors of gender<x-msg://22/#group_thread_1> [2 Updates]

 pronoun errors in gender<http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes/t/e5b87a868833f3b7>

Denis Donovan <dmdonovan1937 at gmail.com<mailto:dmdonovan1937 at gmail.com>> Jun 16 07:45PM -0400

Hi Laura,

Just a few thoughts on the subject you have raised.

One of the problems with posing categorical problems is that they may, or may not, present quite the same challenges to practical understanding in different language worlds. In English, we can certainly refer to a city such as Paris, as Alistair Horne did in his marvelous history, SEVEN AGES OF PARIS, as a woman. And it is standard to refer to ships as feminine. No one would ever say of the Titanic "He sunk."

Whereas London, through the ages, has always betrayed clearly male orientations, and New York has a certain ambivalence, has any sensible person ever doubted that Paris is fundamentally a woman? It was thus that I first conceived this book--not as any arrogant attempt to write an all-embracing history of Paris, but rather as a series of linked biographical essays, depicting seven ages (capriciously selected at the whim of the author) in the long, exciting life of a sexy and beautiful, but also turbulent, troublesome and sometimes excessively violent woman (Horne :xiii).

Horne, Alistaire (2004). Seven Ages of Paris. New York: Vintage.

But languages that mark the gender of things other than people -- objects, places, concepts, etc. -- and those that typically do not present very different psychological or psycholinguistic challenges. You make this observation:

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've attached a clinical example from a book that I'm finishing up that does not fit your pattern. The example is a good 15 years old, although it won't be published until the book is completed shortly. Notice that the issue is both linguistically and clinically complex. Yet it's a not uncommon case.

Best,

Denis

Denis M. Donovan, M.D., M.Ed., F.A.P.S.
Director, EOCT Institute

Medical Director, 1983 - 2006
The Children's Center for Developmental Psychiatry
St. Petersburg, Florida

P.O Box 47576
St. Petersburg, FL 33743-7576
Phone: 727-641-8905
DenisDonovan at EOCT-Institute.org<mailto:DenisDonovan at EOCT-Institute.org>
dmdonovan1937 at gmail.com<mailto:dmdonovan1937 at gmail.com>

 pronoun errors of gender<http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes/t/25b5e418bffec8f7>

"Laura Snow" <lsnow at u.washington.edu<mailto:lsnow at u.washington.edu>> Jun 16 02:31PM -0700

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

Aliyah MORGENSTERN <aliyah.morgenstern at gmail.com<mailto:aliyah.morgenstern at gmail.com>> Jun 17 12:31AM +0200

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 :

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