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Social class differences and the identification of sex in children's speech*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

John R. Edwards
John R. Edwards
Affiliation:
St Patrick's College, Dublin
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Abstract

Judges were asked to identify the sex of prepubertal children by listening to their tape-recorded voices. More incorrect guesses were made of working class girls than of their male counterparts. For middle-class children, however, the pattern was reversed, with more boys being misidentified as girls than the opposite. These findings are related to work demonstrating an association between masculinity and working-class speech, and to the ‘covert prestige’ attaching to such speech as a result. Some practical implications of the results for researchers in the field of child language are also discussed.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , February 1979 , pp. 121 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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Footnotes

[*]

I should like to acknowledge the helpful comments made by Cheris Kramer and Howard Giles on an earlier draft of this paper. Address for correspondence: Educational Research Centre, St Patrick's College, Dublin 9, Ireland.

References

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