Language Log

Catherine Griffin, "Why Women Talk More Than Men: Language Protein Uncovered", Science World Report 2/20/2013.

You know all the times that men complain about women talking too much? Apparently there's a biological explanation for the reason why women are chattier than men. Scientists have discovered that women possess higher levels of a "language protein" in their brains, which could explain why females are so talkative.

Previous research has shown that women talk almost three times as much as men. In fact, an average woman notches up 20,000 words in a day, which is about 13,000 more than the average man. In addition, women generally speak more quickly and devote more brainpower to speaking. Yet before now, researchers haven't been able to biologically explain why this is the case.

Eun Kyung Kim, "Chatty Cathy, listen up: New study reveals why women talk more than men", Today Show 2/21/2013:

Women have a gift for gab, and now they can silence their critics with science.

New research indicates there’s a biological reason why women talk so much more than men: 20,000 words a day spoken by the average woman, according to one study, versus about 7,000 words a day for the average man.

Women’s brains have higher levels of a “language protein” called FOXP2, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

The stimulus for these little nuggets of nonsense was J. Michael Bowers, Miguel Perez-Pouchoulen, N. Shalon Edwards, and Margaret M. McCarthy, "Foxp2 Mediates Sex Differences in Ultrasonic Vocalization by Rat Pups and Directs Order of Maternal Retrieval",  The Journal of Neuroscience, February 20, 2013. More on Bowers et al. later — this morning, I'll just take up the "previous research has shown that women talk almost three times as much as men" business.

My latest column for the Boston Globe is about some fascinating new research presented by Tyler Schnoebelen at the recent NWAV 41 conference at Indiana University Bloomington. Schnoebelen's paper, co-authored with Jacob Eisenstein and David Bamman, is entitled "Gender, styles, and social networks in Twitter" (abstract, full paper, presentation).

When I started to learn Mandarin nearly half a century ago, it used to be that xiǎojiě 小姐 ("miss") was a polite way to refer to or address a young, unmarried woman. You could also extend xiǎojiě 小姐 ("miss", lit., "little elder sister") to convey other, related meanings, such as lǎo xiǎojiě 老小姐 ("old maid / miss"), xiǎojiě píqì 小姐脾气 ("petulant; flirtatious; coquettish"), and so forth. Gradually, however, xiǎojiě 小姐 ("miss") evolved to the point that it often came to be used in a jocular or facetious manner.  Furthermore, when used by itself, xiǎojiě 小姐 may be applied to prostitutes, so one must be careful when referring to someone with this word.  It seems that there is no longer a broadly accepted, relatively respectful term of address for a young, single woman.

(This posting started from an attempt to replace all the links to James Thurber cartoons in Mark's "He bold as a hawk, she soft as a dawn" posting of 9/14/06, here, after the initial Dilbert cartoon, which is still available. All the links are broken, and Mark and I can't figure out which cartoons are supposed to go in which slots. So here's a big compendium of Thurber cartoons on the relations beween the sexes.)

Slate has an article lambasting Sweden's growing enthusiasm for total gender neutrality, and it raises the profile of a move, actually originating in the mid 1960s, to get hen established as a new pronoun meaning "he/she/it", eliminating the forced choice between han "he" and hon "she".

Brett Reynolds writes:

Over on English Language & Usage, the following question appeared:

Many Japanese textbooks of English mention the "feminine 'so'": the use of "so" for "very" is more typical of a feminine speaker. I don't think this is true in the US (I learned English living in Southern California and have now lived in the US for 10 years), but is it at all true in the UK? In other parts of the world?

I don't have access to a male/female tagged corpus. Would you be interested in following this up?

I don't have time this morning for a very elaborate investigation, but a small (one cup of coffee) Breakfast Experiment™ suggests that the use of so as an intensifier is indeed (statistically, not categorically) sex-associated.

You've probably noticed that how people talk depends on who they're talking with. And for 40 years or so, linguists and psychologists and sociologists have referred to this process as "speech accommodation" or "communication accommodation" — or, for short, just plain "accommodation".  This morning's Breakfast Experiment™  explores a version of the speech accommodation effect as applied to groups rather than individuals — some ways that men and women talk differently in same-sex vs. mixed-sex conversations.

In confessing her like-aholism ("My Love Affair With 'Like'", Jezebel 6/26/2011), Erin Gloria Ryan framed the problem in terms of gender roles:

Any girl who's been teased for middle school nerdery has likely developed a long standing aversion for the feeling of being excluded for being too smart or opinionated. This is the way that socially acceptable people talk. This is the way that pretty people talk. Women are taught that it's more important to be pretty and socially accepted than it is to be smart. Ergo, like.

She's talking about the discourse-particle like, as in her example "so, like, my sentences, like, sound like this. And I, like, sound dumber than I actually am".  She reports a student evaluation that also noted the stereotypical association with youth: ""She says 'like' more often than a valley girl".

Are these stereotypes accurate? Is the discourse-particle like really characteristic of younger women? Today's Breakfast Experiment™ looks into the matter, and finds (in a limited and superficial survey of proxy measures) that one part of the stereotype is apparently valid, but the other is not.

Yesterday, the "most viewed" and "most emailed" item on the New York Times website was Deborah Tannen's essay, "Why Sisterly Chats Make People Happier", which opens this way:

"Having a Sister Makes You Happier": that was the headline on a recent article about a study finding that adolescents who have a sister are less likely to report such feelings as "I am unhappy, sad or depressed" and "I feel like no one loves me."

These findings are no fluke; other studies have come to similar conclusions. But why would having a sister make you happier?

The usual answer — that girls and women are more likely than boys and men to talk about emotions — is somehow unsatisfying, especially to a researcher like me. Much of my work over the years has developed the premise that women's styles of friendship and conversation aren't inherently better than men's, simply different.

In last week's news, there was a fair amount of interest in a study finding that women apologize more than men do. Curiously, there has been no coverage so far, as far as I can tell, by the New York Times, by the Washington Post, by BBC News, or by NPR. I hope that this is not because the reporters, editors, and pundits at these more serious publications collectively decided, contrary to their usual judgment in such cases,  that this was a bit of gender-stereotyping fluff better left to the tabloids.

In my opinion the study was well designed and well done (with the usual caveat that the subjects were all 20-ish undergraduate psychology students), and the paper documenting it was clear, careful, and thought-provoking.  Also, for a change, the press coverage seems to have been fairly accurate so far. I suspect that this is a tribute to the paper's lucidity, and perhaps also to the communication skills of Karina Schumann, who was the first author and the person most often interviewed by reporters.

That's the title of Cordelia Fine's new book, due out on August 30.

Some reviews: Katherine Bouton, "Peeling Away Theories on Gender and the Brain", NYT 8/23/2010; Robin McKie, "Male and female ability differences down to socialisation, not genetics", The Observer 8/15/2010; "Q&A: 'Delusions of Gender' author Cordelia Fine", USA Today 8/9/2010; Louise Grey, "New book leads 'backlash' against sexual stereotypes that say men are from Mars and women are from Venus", The Telegraph 8/16/2010.

Delusions of Gender joins Lise Eliot's Pink Brain, Blue Brain (published in May and due out in paperback on Sept. 2) in a backlash of experts against the "sex difference evangelists" — authors like Leonard Sax and Louann Brizendine, picked up in the popular press, and promoted by pundits like David Brooks.

To follow up on Mark's post, below, on the bottomless fatuity of Robert Fisk: we gave a bunch of these items in –ess to the members of the American Heritage Usage Panel some years ago; Kristen Hanson and I reported some of the results in an LSA paper in 1988. What we found is that even then, the generally conservative and venerable writers and editors on the panel were bailing out on the suffix, retaining it only where it had a certain historical signficance.

Robert Fisk, the well-known linguistic paleoconservative,  has been reduced to playing little games with his copy editors in order to create material for his columns ("Our language has a way of turning women into men", The Independent, 8/14/2010):

A week ago, in my front-page story on the Hiroshima commemoration, I planted a little trap for our sub-editors.

I referred to Vita Sackville-West as a "poetess". And sure enough, the sub (or "subess") changed it – as I knew he or she would – to "poet". Aha! Soon as I saw it, I knew I could write this week about the mysterious – not to say mystical – grammar of feminism and political correctness. At least, I guess feminism was the start of it all, for was it not in the Eighties and early Nineties that newspapers started turning feminine nouns into male nouns? This was the age, was it not, when an "actress" became an "actor", when a "priestess" became a "priest" – which does sound more sensible – and when a "conductress" became a "conductor". A policeman and policewoman have turned into "police officers" (even if they are constables).