Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Are gender associations in general language reflected in thewords spoken to and by children? Previous work has sug-gested that language reveals gender differences in discourse,speech style, language use and acquisition. Work in artificialintelligence has shown that word embeddings trained on largecorpora reflect human gender associations. We connect thiswork to developmental psychology by exploring whether gen-der associations in word embeddings are present in the linguis-tic input and output of children, and if so, how early genderedlanguage emerges. We present a computational method thatquantifies the gender associations of words and use a corpus ofchild-caretaker speech to show that these gender associationscorrelate significantly with those in word embeddings. Wediscover that gendered word use emerges in English-speakingchildren around age 2, and the gender associations cannotbe explained solely by variables including word length, fre-quency, concreteness, and valence.