Hum (Jan 2014)
Gender Differences in Pre-school Children’s Communication
Abstract
“Boys and girls grow up in different worlds, but we think we’re in the same one, so we judge each other’s behavior by the standards of our own.“ (Tannen, 1990) According to Tannen, the key difference between these two communities, i.e. male and female, is power on the male side and solidarity on the female side. The paper aims at relating Tannen’s theory to the communication strategies of pre-school children (three to six years old) from several Mostar kindergartens. The research carried out for this purpose tries to explain language behavior of girls and boys during children’s interaction in the same-sex groups as well as in the mixed-sex groups and to elaborate on the nature of two different gender cultures, their origins, and examples on how gender-related cultural norms affect language. Children of this age have just begun integration into their own subculture within a culture – men’s or women’s. They are, as far as their gender is concerned, still a, so called, tabula rasa which is yet to be filled with the rules of each subculture.
