Pj. Bauer et Mj. Coyne, WHEN THE NAME SAYS IT ALL - PRESCHOOLERS RECOGNITION AND USE OF THE GENDERED NATURE OF COMMON PROPER-NAMES, Social development, 6(3), 1997, pp. 271-291
By the time they enter preschool children have acquired extensive know
ledge of gender stereotypes. There has been little work on their use o
f this knowledge to make inferences about behavior; there is virtually
no information as to how the explicitness of gender-category informat
ion influences the reliability of inferences. In two experiments we te
sted 3-1/2-year-old children's recognition and use of less-than-explic
it, yet highly reliable, cues to gender-category membership: common pr
oper names. In Experiment I children reliably associated feminine-ster
eotyped names with pictures of girls and masculine-stereotyped names w
ith pictures of boys; they did not reliably associate gender-neutral n
ames with pictures of girls and boys. In Experiment 2 children used th
eir knowledge of same-gender-category names to make predictions about
the preferences of otherwise sex-unspecified targets; they did not mak
e reliable predictions when the targets were labeled with opposite-gen
der-category names. In contrast, when the tar gets were labeled with g
endered common nouns ('girl' and 'boy') performance was reliable and w
as not affected by match or mismatch between the sex of the child and
the gender category of the target. The findings indicate differential
patterns of development and application of gender-category consistent
versus gender-category inconsistent knowledge.