Variable Pronoun Usage in Child Speech

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Hamburg, language: English, abstract: The present study investigated children’s pronoun usage in reference to animals of unknown sex. It was found that different factors that lie in the nature and behavior of the antecedents influence the choice between masculine he, feminine she and neuter it. Moreover, it could be shown that children’s use of the masculine pronoun he is disproportionally more frequent than their use of feminine she and neuter it. These results support the animal=male hypothesis framed by Lambdin et al. (Lambdin et al, 2003).