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psocopteraTook the kids to a language research study at Harvard today, and it was *fascinating* - over the course of a twenty-minute experiment Q went from using gender-neutral labels to mimicking the experimenter in using gendered labels.
The setup involved them taking turns describing simple scenes, and the actual study was about double-object vs prepositional-object sentences, which I didn't even catch, while observing. What I did catch was that at first Q's descriptions were all "the person swinging the hammer" or "the person had the flowers", or, once, "the grownup", for a woman, while the experimenter always said "the girl", "the boy", "the man", or "the woman" (four repeating characters). At some point, Q switched to also using those terms, maybe once the characters became familiar through repetition? I love these experiments because I always end up noticing things the kids do I never would at home - it was really interesting to hear my language quirk (I tend to say "person" for anyone, real or character, I don't know the name of) coming out of his mouth, and then to see how quickly he adapted to someone else's pattern instead. (And if the experimenter and I had traded in and out, I suppose we could have discovered if Q has code-switching yet...) Totally going to try to get him to describe me a scene tomorrow and see if he opts for "person" or a gendered term, see how persistent that effect was.
The setup involved them taking turns describing simple scenes, and the actual study was about double-object vs prepositional-object sentences, which I didn't even catch, while observing. What I did catch was that at first Q's descriptions were all "the person swinging the hammer" or "the person had the flowers", or, once, "the grownup", for a woman, while the experimenter always said "the girl", "the boy", "the man", or "the woman" (four repeating characters). At some point, Q switched to also using those terms, maybe once the characters became familiar through repetition? I love these experiments because I always end up noticing things the kids do I never would at home - it was really interesting to hear my language quirk (I tend to say "person" for anyone, real or character, I don't know the name of) coming out of his mouth, and then to see how quickly he adapted to someone else's pattern instead. (And if the experimenter and I had traded in and out, I suppose we could have discovered if Q has code-switching yet...) Totally going to try to get him to describe me a scene tomorrow and see if he opts for "person" or a gendered term, see how persistent that effect was.
