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Girls and boys as young as five years old use language differently, and this reflects the different socialisation processes that they undergo.
That is the finding of some recent research by Basil Bernstein and his colleagues, well known for their work on the relations between language and social class.
GIRLS TIED TO MOTHERS' LANGUAGE USE Middle-class girls were much mere strongly affected by the way their mothers used language than were middle class boys. The mother's use of language with the child was measured on a Maternal Communication Index, based on the combined scores of two types of tests. The first assessed the willingness of the mother to talk to her child in a variety of situations; the second assessed the extent to which the mother would avoid answering difficult questions asked by the child. So a high score on the Index represented a mother who would reply to her child's attempts to chat to her in a range of contexts, and who would explain rather than avoid difficult questions asked by the child. Middle class mothers tended to score much higher on the Index than working class mothers.
Middle class girls aged five were given various language tasks -describing pictures, completing stories, explaining games, etc. The working class girls with mothers who scored high on the Maternal Communication Index use far more words on these tasks than middle class girls with low-scoring mothers an average proportionate word-score of 10 as against 3. These differences did not appear in the boys' scores. The differences in the girls case arise from the greater reliance of the daughter on her mother. The male child is more likely to be developing relationships with other boys of his own age who will influence his language use, while the five year old middle-class girl is tied to the home. The middle class boy's general environment is more stimulating than that of the girl, and thus the girl is more dependent on the stimulation of her mother's language. Those girls with mothers who have high Index scores will develop a greater range of language ability than boys; on the other hand, those girls with low-spring mothers will suffer greater disadvantage than boys. MORE SUBMISSIVE ROLE OF GIRLS Middle class mothers also tended to be more coercive and to give less explanations to the girl than to the boy. These sex differences did not appear in working class families. Bernstein suggests that there is a tendency for middle class parents to socialise the girl into a more submissive social role than that of the boy.
LOOKING AFTER BROTHERS AND SISTERS A large sex difference was found in the use of different adjectives. Five year old girls used more adjectives than boys continued on page 15