another gender anecdote

[Barbara Pearson]

Dear All,
Since we're sharing anecdotes, here is one from Tom Roeper's book Prism of Grammar .

Roeper is recounting a story from Patrick Griffiths, so this is now 3rd-hand--but it, too, contributes to answering Laura's original question with, "yes, typically-developing children make theses errors and no, there doesn't seem to be much systematic work on it yet." 

(p. 64)  "PG has reported meeting a boy who called everyone he. To probe the boy's grammar further, he put out a male doll and a female doll and asked the boy to point to "she", which he obligingly did, (pointing to the female doll).  Then Patrick .. pointed to the boy's mother and asked, "How about your mother?"  --to which the boy confidently replied, "He's she."  

TR also points out that there are children who label everyone "she."
Sounds like there's a study in there for someone.

Cheers,
Barbara 

On Jun 17, 2012, at 2:44 PM, <sbraunwd at cox.net> wrote:

> The Braunwald-Max Planck Corpus contains some early errors beginning at about  22-23 months of age.  The data in CHILDES do not contain my context notes so I am sending this example from the original diary data.  I have not specifically analyzed the data for this purpose, but this example illustrates one normal child's early confusion. As the example illustrates, there are two steps in the process. The first step is to learn the difference in gender between the referents of the  nouns boy and girl. The second and concurrently emerging step is to figure out how  the difference in the gender of a referent relates to the system of English pronouns.
> 
> Laura, 01;10.26 is watching the family's male cat, Peanuts, climbing a screen to a patio door. I am with her. The following is my complete diary entry.
>     L: He bad girl.
>     M: He's a bad boy.
>     M: Or she's a bad girl. (laughing)
>     L: She bad boy.
> She [L] has great confusion now with 3rd person singular. She uses he for it as subject and he or she interchangeably. She uses it correctly as object, however. (J4-71 #317)
> 
> This example of a  pronoun gender error comes from a month during which Laura is more generally very confused about how to use English pronouns. From a longitudinal and developmental perspective, these errors appear to be part of a larger problem involving how pronouns work. Laura is also having trouble with first person singular pronouns.
> 
> Laura, 01;10.18, "Great 1st person pronoun confusion. She uses predominately My but also an occasional I and Me. The rule--if there is one--however must be My + verb or + adjective. This my is beginning to generalize to verbs with which she used I so that I'm hearing 'My have/I have, My get/I get.' But she is clearly confused which suggests learning. The reason I think that she must use a rule is that she doesn't imitate the immediately preceding model (e.g., M: I'm pooped. L: My pooped too.)." J4-60 #217
> 
> It is important to note that these examples come from a toddler.  Sue Braunwald
> 
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************************************************
Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D.
Research Associate, Depts of Linguistics and   Communication Disorders
c/o 226 South College
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst MA 01003

bpearson at research.umass.edu
http://www.umass.edu/aae/bp_indexold.htm
http://www.zurer.com/pearson

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