Development of psychosexual concepts in relation to expressive language performance.

Cognitive-developmental theory suggests that the learning of gender identity concepts is a sequential process, beginning with the learning of one's own gender, and moving to recognition of the invariance of gender as a human characteristic. Neither clinical nor theoretical literature can fully explain the steps involved. In this study, retarded and nonretarded children were asked to respond to tasks requiring knowledge of core gender identity and gender constancy. When both the retarded and nonretarded children were pooled, a significant interaction was found across all ages between expressive language performance and the development of the psychosexual concepts of core gender identity and gender constancy.