Children's memory for gender-neutral pronouns

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105589

. 2023 Mar:227:105589.

doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105589. Epub 2022 Nov 23.

Children's memory for gender-neutral pronouns

Katie Vasquez¹, Rodney Tompkins², Kristina R Olson³, Yarrow Dunham⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511, USA; Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA. Electronic address: kvasquez@uchicago.edu.
² Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511, USA; Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA.
³ Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.
⁴ Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511, USA.

PMID: 36427384
DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105589

Children's memory for gender-neutral pronouns

Katie Vasquez et al. J Exp Child Psychol. 2023 Mar.

. 2023 Mar:227:105589.

doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105589. Epub 2022 Nov 23.

Authors

Katie Vasquez¹, Rodney Tompkins², Kristina R Olson³, Yarrow Dunham⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511, USA; Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA. Electronic address: kvasquez@uchicago.edu.
² Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511, USA; Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA.
³ Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.
⁴ Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511, USA.

PMID: 36427384
DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105589

Abstract

Are there disparities in children's memory for gender-neutral pronouns compared with gendered pronouns? We explored this question in two preregistered studies with 4- to 10-year-old children (N = 168; 79 boys, 89 girls, 0 gender-diverse). Participants were presented with a memory task. An experimenter read an illustrated story about a target character. Participants were asked to verbally repeat the story to measure spontaneous pronoun use and then to explicitly recall the characters' pronouns. In Study 1 the story characters had typically feminine or typically masculine appearances (determined by independent raters), whereas in Study 2 the characters had gender-neutral appearances. In both studies, targets were referred to with gendered or gender-neutral pronouns. In both studies, children more accurately recalled gendered pronouns than gender-neutral pronouns. However, on most tasks, children only used "they" if a character had gender-neutral pronouns, and almost never used "they" if a character had gendered pronouns. We also found some evidence suggesting that older children more accurately recall gender-neutral pronouns compared with younger children.

Keywords: Gender; Gender inclusive language; Gender-neutral pronouns; Language development; Nonbinary inclusive language; Pronouns; Social cognitive development.

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Children's memory for gender-neutral pronouns

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Children's memory for gender-neutral pronouns

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