Gendered Language in Interactive Discourse

Abstract

Over two studies, we examined the nature of gendered language in interactive discourse. In the first study, we analyzed gendered language from a chat corpus to see whether tokens of gendered language proposed in the gender-as-culture hypothesis (Maltz and Borker in Language and social identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 196-216, 1982) can be found in interactive language. Of the eight tokens examined only three were found to differ in the hypothesized direction, and these only in male-male dyads. In the second study, we trained a male and a female confederate to use either male or female gendered tokens found to be reliable in Study One in their chats with participants. Our design permits disentangling of effects due to knowledge of the gender of the interlocutors and use of specific language tokens. We find that use of language tokens by the confederate promoted use of the same token by their interlocutor, regardless of knowledge of the confederate's gender. Moreover use of tokens consistent or inconsistent with visible gender influenced how the interlocutor perceived the confederate. Taken together these data are inconsistent with either the notion that gendered language is context independent (as suggested in the gender-as-culture hypothesis) or the notion that gendered language only emerges when gender is made salient, as would, in these studies, occur in mixed-gendered groups.