I'm surprised to find this paper in a referreed psycholinguistic journal. The analysis is interesting, but its data has no logical connection whatever to gender differences. There are exactly two subjects, and it's true that one them is female while the other is male. But in addition, one of them is from a suburb of Chicago while the other is from rural Arkansas. So perhaps this is really a study about "Regional Differences in the Media Interviews of Bill and Hillary Clinton"? And the two subjects differ in many other ways as well -- the article could with equal plausibility have been presented as telling us about "Social Class Differences" or "The Effect of Early Family Life". Or just "Individual Differences".
May 14, 2007
Does Hillary talk like a girl?
Mark Liberman explains why we were right to yawn at that report on a psycholinguistic study that purported to find gender difference in Bill and Hillary's use of language.
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So perhaps this is really a study about "Regional Differences in the Media Interviews of Bill and Hillary Clinton"?
They looked at several things, including "so" and the number of syllables used in each interview. Both have traditionally been assumed to be markers of gender rather than region or class.
However, the "non-standard" uses compared between both Clintons would definitely be influenced by region (and a whole host of other linguistic factors that the article seems to ignore).
Yet, regardless of methodological issues, I would think the conclusion of the article would seem to be more controversial. Senator Clinton is engaging in "powerless" talk while her husband is engaging in "powerful" talk. The idea that using more intesifiers (so) or hedging (you know) is somehow less powerful than not using them or using more "non-standard" forms is a form of power talk is ridiculous.
God, I love Language Log. It's so refreshing (and rare) to hear people talk sense about subjects where sense is actually talkable.
99.9% of the bullshit on Earth can be detected simply by asking, "what are you comparing it to?"
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