Abstract
In this paper, we present an analysis of hypothesized sex-specific genre preferences in spontaneous narratives in a corpus of 286 transcribed recordings of younger school children (aged 6-11). We draw upon Nicolopoulou's conception of narratives as a symbolic activity with sex-specific tendencies: girls prefer the "family" genre and boys prefer the "heroic-agonistic" one.
We operationalized Nikolopoulou's genre classification into 10 thematic narrative features and an-notated their respective presence or absence in each narrative. The application of a combination of statistical methods to our sample revealed that the sex-correlated narrative preferences are so weak that they have no implications, e.g. for school practice.
The most prominent result, in fact, even coun-ters the a priori assumption of sex-based narrative preferences: no matter what sex or age, children show a strong preference for "mutual aid and cooperation".