Childrens Understanding of Sexist Language - Article Example

The purpose of the study was to explore the role of language in the sex inputting process concentrating mainly on the “gender-neutral” use of “he” and“his”.The study was also used to provide answers on how different people process the use of “he” as a gender-neutral word.
This kind of study is an empirical study dealing with the use of he and his as gender-neutral terms. The study was carried out by conducting studies in which college students and graders were the respondents. Moulton et al. (1978) developed research where he used first, third, fifth graders and college students on subjects to tell stories as a way to respond to a cue sentence where he used a clue sentence containing” he”, “he” or “she “ or “they” (Hyde, 697s). This is replicated in the study as experiment 1 where the researcher adds age difference response to “he” and other tasks to get a better understanding of the use of “he” as a gender-neutral time. Interviews were split into two and each half was conducted by males and females on elementary school children while college students filled forms. The second experiment in the study involved replication and extension of experiment one to include “she”, rule knowledge protocol, effects of using gender-related pronouns on cognition and stereotyping. Third and fifth graders were used as a sample in the second experiment.
The study concludes that subjects from first grade to college have an increased tendency of thinking about males after hearing the term “he” despite it being said in a gender-neutral term. The demonstration evidenced from the wudgemaker data in the article is that using gender-related pronouns affects the notion of children on the ability of women to succeed in an occupation and the form of the occupation. The report also concludes on the need to have increased empirical and theoretical attention on the effect of language use in sex-role development.
There are several measures through which the study could have been improved to ensure the increased accuracy of the conclusion and the ability to generalize the research to the total population. The recommendations for improvement include increasing the research sample to 600 to ensure inclusivity of a large sample of students from college, first graders, third, and fifth grades. The reason for an augmented sample is to allow the study to be more representative of the views of the population on gender-neutral pronouns. The impact of augmented representation allows the study to be extrapolated to the general population.
The other recommendation for the improvement of the research is an introduction of parents and older individuals to the study sample to provide their view on the understanding of children on sexist language. The reason for the recommendation is that it allows the study to have the opinion of the older community members in the community who have an understanding of the gender-specific pronouns, “he” and “his” for the care and live with the children. Read More