Gender Differences in Language (54990)
Psycholinguistics is defined by www.hyperdictionary.com
as "the branch of cognitive psychology that studies the psychological basis of linguistic competence and performance". One aspect of language skills necessary for full competence is narrative ability - the capacity to tell a coherent story. The research question I have posed relevant to psycholinguistics is how gender differences are reflected in the different ways males and females tell stories.
To answer this question I have selected two articles. The first one - Sex differences in parental influences on children's story-telling skills by George F. Michel (1994) รป deals with the effect of gender on the acquisition of narrative skills. The second, by Stephanie L. Dubois (1997), entitled Gender differences in the emotional tone of written sexual fantasies examines the differences in male and female erotic fantasies, which are examples of narrative or story-telling.
The first paper examined will be Sex differences in parental influences on children's story-telling skills by George F. Michel (1994).
Purpose of study: Reasoning that verbal communication between parent and child is affected by the sex of both parent and child, Michel sought to test his hypothesis that sex differences would affect parental story telling and children's acquisition of story-telling skills.
Subjects: The subjects for this study were 30 5-year-old children (15 girls, 15 boys) who told a story from a picture book both before and after hearing a parent (12 mothers or 12 fathers) tell the story.
Procedures and Methods: The researchers used a picture storybook, Frog, Where Are You? by Mercer Mayer (1969) in order to provide a story-telling experience comparable to all the kids in the study. They picked the book because it contains no words, and therefore gave the story-telling parents great leeway in how they would explain the structure of th...