UC Santa Cruz

The influence of contextual factors on parent-child interactions, and the role of these factors in the incidence of gender differences in communication, was examined. Twelve daughters and twelve sons (mean age = 43 months) visited a university laboratory on separate occasions, once with their mothers and once with their fathers. During both visits, the parent-child pair played with a relatively masculine-stereotyped toy set, oriented toward construction play (a take-apart car), and a relatively feminine-stereotyped toy set, oriented toward social-dramatic play (props for a grocery store). Transcripts of the parent and child speech acts were coded while listening to audiotape recordings of the interactions. The results indicated that the play activity, and not the speaker's gender, significantly affected both parents' and children's use of different speech acts. Parent gender was an additional predictor of children's speech. All of the significant effects had large effect sizes. The findings support theoretical models and other research reports that emphasise the importance of activity settings in the sex-typing process.