Constituting Gender Through Talk in Childhood

This issue explores some of the ways in which gender, as a social construction, might be rooted in and contingent on conversational processes in childhood. The interconnections between language and gender in three key developmental sociolinguistic contexts are examined: talk between parent and child, talk among friends, and talk between siblings. When children learn to speak a language, they also learn to use it in ways that can reflect, resist, or ignore their culture's norms of acceptable femi