Pickle fights: Gendered talk in preschool disputes

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of gender on how young children construct the texts that embody their everyday social interactions with peers. The analysis focuses on conflict talk among 3‐year‐old friends playing in same‐sex triads at their day‐care center. The gendered aspects of two disputes are made visible by interpreting them in terms of two models. Maltz and Borker's anthropological linguistic model characterizes feminine language style as affiliative and masculine style as adversarial. Gilligan's psychological framework, describing gender differences in reasoning about moral conflicts, characterizes the feminine orientation as focusing on the relationship and the masculine as focusing on the self. The two dispute sequences studied are also consistent with predictions made by Miller, Danaher, and Forbes (1986) and Leaper (1988), that boys’ conflict process is more heavy‐handed and their discourse strategies more controlling, whereas girls’ conflict is more mitigated and their discourse strategies more collaborative. The study demonstrates the gendered nature of children's peer talk at as young as 3 years of age.