Blog #10 "Sex differences in parent-child interaction"

Gleason makes a point that really caught my attention. She claims, much as other linguistic experts, that language differences between adult men and women arise in childhood. What makes her claim stand out is that she states “the most likely context of their development lies in the arena of parent-child interaction” (190). The rest of the reading I have done so far says that children learn to speak a particular way from their young peers, but Gleason thinks it has much more to do with the child’s parents. This just makes sense. Parents are the people a child interacts with most for the first few years of their lives when language is being developed. Parents teach their children about the world around them using language.

I have a four month old daughter, and I cannot imagine that as her parent I do not have a major role in teaching her how to speak. Once my daughter is four or five and attending school, I can see her learning to hone her gender specific language skills on the playground, but she must learn the basic skills at home before she can even play with the other kids. I know I speak to her in a certain way because she is a girl, and when I have a boy my language towards him will be different. If sex-linked language differences are partly a product of the environment, I have to agree with Gleason that girls and boys must learn their language related gender roles from their parents.