Language Log

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).

[This is a guest posting by Larry [Laurence] Horn (of Yale), taken, with his permission, from a posting he made today on the American Dialect Society mailing list. If you comment on it, remember that these are his words, not mine.]

In the first paragraph of a letter to the editor in this weekend's NYT Magazine, a writer offers the following grammatical argument against the use of transgendered:

Amusing inversion of gendered communication stereotypes:

Shorter Louann Brizendine, from today's Non Sequitur:

Randall Munroe has  a great post on the xkcd blog that reports and discusses the results of an online color survey.  With 222,500 user responses, this was almost certainly the largest scientific experiment ever run by a cartoonist.

The most interesting result reported so far is an experimental test of the old stereotype about sex differences in color naming.

This is from a little while back (I've been sick — a brief account of the crisis point, back in early February, here, but the condition has continued to dog me and consumes much of my life). It's a Zits combining two of our enduring interests on Language Log, the language of adolescents and language and gender, especially the latter:

Here we see the affectionate couple (with the girl breathlessly telling the story in detail, while the guy interrupts her with an eight-word summary) enacting a gender stereotype that's often been a focus on Language Log: the talkative, emotional female versus the laconic, bare-bones male. Plus another gender stereotype, of the relationship-oriented female versus the fact-oriented male (the hell with the cuddling and all that stuff, let's get on to the important stuff, the making out).

I've been playing with the idea of assembling a gallery of Language Log cartoons (many from Zits) on gender stereotypes, and maybe another one of strips on teenspeak, along the lines of the gallery of my academic "postcard collages", most on language-related themes, linked to here.

The cover of Louann Brizendine's new book The Male Brain is puzzling.