WHEN THE NAME SAYS IT ALL - PRESCHOOLERS RECOGNITION AND USE OF THE GENDERED NATURE OF COMMON PROPER-NAMES

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.