Social class differences and the identification of sex in children's speech

Abstract

ABSTRACTJudges were asked to identify the sex of prepubertal children by listening to their tape-recorded voices. More incorrect guesses were made of working class girls than of their male counterparts. For middle-class children, however, the pattern was reversed, with more boys being misidentified as girls than the opposite. These findings are related to work demonstrating an association between masculinity and working-class speech, and to the ‘covert prestige’ attaching to such speech as a result. Some practical implications of the results for researchers in the field of child language are also discussed.