The Trouble with Gender Pronouns

Michael, Speech Pathologist, Change for Life

Gender pronouns—him, her, she, & he–are types of deictic expressions. All children find deictic expressions challenging, because unlike words such as ‘tree’ or ‘cat,’ they don’t reliably label a single object or class of objects in all situations. Instead, deictic expressions require the addition of specific contexts in order to make sense of them: for example, the ‘there’ phrase “just leave it there” can reasonably be interpreted to mean ‘on the kitchen bench’ if that’s where the speaker was looking at the time, but would likely leave the listener quite confused if it was uttered during a phone conversation.

In order for a child to learn the distinction between deictic expressions such as ‘this,’ and ‘that,’ they have to intuit that ‘this’ and ‘that’ can refer to many different things, and that the only thing that remains the same is the speaker’s perspective. And when it comes to gender pronouns, there are at least two layers of complexity involved: the first, and most obvious, is that we need to use a different pronoun depending on whether we are talking about someone who is female vs. someone who is male. Even when we have figured this out, however, we are still left to choose between ‘her’ or ‘she’ in the event that it’s a female person we’re talking about.

Figuring out the ‘she’ vs ‘her’ puzzle requires the ability to take perspective into account. Is this person doing some action (“She is riding her bike”), or is she receiving an an action (“The cat jumped in her lap”)?

When children mix up gender pronouns, and refer to boys as ‘she,’ or girls as ‘he,’ it provides a startling illustration of how language and social development contribute to, and depend upon, each other. If a child is using pronouns at all, it demonstrates that they have at least begun to grasp that there is a class of words which can ‘fill in,’ for proper nouns. But if they refer to Steven as ‘she,’ then this might just be because their social development has not yet reached the point where they can use the right pronoun for the right context.

It is important to understand, then, that a child who is confusing gender pronouns is not necessarily incapable of grasping these kids of distinctions. The more likely explanation is that either their language or social development—or both—has not yet reached the level where they can mark these distinctions verbally. And given that children with Autism Spectrum Disorder can often find it harder to adopt the perspectives of other people, it is little surprise that gender-pronoun errors, and deictic errors of all kinds, show up more often in this population.

Parents can help children who make these sorts of errors by recasting their sentences. So, if Max says “he is sitting down” when referring to a boy, you would say “he is sitting down”—making sure to put emphasis on the ‘he.’ If your child is seeing a Speech Pathologist, on the other hand, they might well take a combined approach wherein they target both his or her language and social development—which includes perspective taking.