Gender and Grammatical Cohesion in Indonesian Preschoolers’ Narrative

Abstract

AbstractThis study compares Indonesian-speaking boys’ and girls’ narrative ability, focusing on grammatical cohesive devices in the production. The subjects are children aged 4–6 years attending a kindergarten (TK) in Bogor, West Java. We use elicited production task to obtain data of children's utterances. Twenty-eight children in total participated in the study. The main data for the study are stories narrated by the children, elicited from a wordless picture storybook. Children are interviewed individually at school. The analysis is also supported by parental questionnaires on factual information distributed to and filled out by parents. Children's personal information obtained from school. Comparison of the use of cohesive devices, namely reference, ellipsis, substitution, and conjunction, based on gender difference, is analyzed quantitatively. The result shows that both genders have the same ability in using grammatical cohesive devices. This study reaffirms the result of previous studies, which essentially state that gender does not significantly affect the language skills.