Search results

The authors examine gender segregation and cross-sex play in a comparative perspective. Although some level of gender segregation seems to be a universal feature in children's play, taking an interpretive view, it was found that children in some peer cultures emphasize gender differences and ritualize cross-sex interactions and in other cultures, children seldom enforce gender boundaries. Gender identity varies in salience and practice among Italian children, lower-class African American children, and upper-middle-class White American children. Thus, studying gender segregation as something that is constructed and negotiated in children's peer cultures rather than a universal phenomenon that is strictly based on biological or cognitive factors provides a clearer picture.

This paper focuses on how the socio-ecological environment provides specific socially-defined opportunities for interaction and talk. The socially defined character of the different areas of a nursery school are seen as the generated product of both the conventionalised expectations, and the accustomed, practiced expectations which are the product of pathways of usage and performance specifics which arise from the habitual usages of certain areas. These two kinds of expectations are responsible for the communicative activities and strategies of the children in different areas. In this way the notion of context is broadened and given a sociological significance which it lacks in psycholinguistic studies of childrens' language. Such a study of language in action is concerned not with the linguist's notion of meaning, but with language as a social performance of situated meaning and the negotiated understandings that arise from this. In the analysis of sample conversations we explore how through peer play children generate a social order which differs from adult conceptions. The conversations taken from interaction in three differently identified areas of the nursery, indicate that children have different sociolinguistic conventions from adults and that their play activities generate their own interactive realizations.