The Difference Blog by Dan4th ([info]differenceblog) wrote,
@ 2007-08-14 09:29:00
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Entry tags:bass, ben, boyfriend, constantinos boulis, conversation, coupons, crafts, cute, data and tools, dude, fisher corpus, fuck, fucking, goodness, gosh, husband, husband's, language tasks, lexical, linda, linguistic data consortium, mari ostendorf, matt, refunding, shit, speech, steve, swearing, telephone, wife, wife's, words

Lexical differences (pt 1 of 2)


The words found by Boulis and Ostendorf (2005)
that most distinguish a male-male phone call
from a female-female phone call.
Boulis and Ostendorf (2005) suggest that conversations between men and conversations between women can be distinguished by transcripts at a 100% accuracy level. Accuracy was high, but not perfect, in mixed-sex conversations, which Boulis and Ostendorf suggest is due to adjustment of word choice based on the intended listener. Boulis and Ostendorf used the Fisher Corpus (2004, pdf), compiled by the Linguistic Data Consortium, as their sample set. Telephone call participants were volunteers, randomly assigned to a stranger, and instructed to speak on a randomly selected topic.


I'm not particularly surprised that people tailor their language to the audience; I'd be more surprised if they didn't. I have to say that I'm baffled by the result that names appear so often in conversations with a stranger. I'm also curious whether "bass" refers to the musical term or the fish in the male list. Since they were working from transcriptions, it's possible that it's both. Either way, it strikes me as funny.

Perhaps it's my female socialization talking, but the idea of swearing on the phone at a complete stranger makes me a little queasy. Okay, talking on the phone makes me a little queasy in general, but I do tend to take my profanity cues from my audience. However, I never would have signed up for this study in the first place (due to my distaste for phone conversation and talking to strangers), so I'm obviously not represented in the sample. The Fisher Corpus paper makes it look like these were paid phone calls, advertised online and in newspapers. It does not report (and I haven't found elsewhere) demographic data on the subjects.

[edit: whoops -- there is both demographic data and a list of the conversation topics in the comments]

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[info]ukelele
2007-08-14 01:36 pm UTC (link)
I have to wonder how much the "between strangers" thing impacted the results. Perhaps, when talking to strangers, people tend to default to gender-stereotyped language (that being one of the few things they know about the stranger). I guess they got around that somewhat by assigning the topics (otherwise perhaps the male list would be all sports or something), but there are probably still ways people feel it's safe & appropriate to talk to strangers, based on sex, that wouldn't necessarily apply in friend or even familiar acquaintance situations (since you know many other traits besides sex and they may seem more salient or interesting).

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[info]plumtreeblossom
2007-08-14 01:37 pm UTC (link)
I would be interested to see a list of the random topics they were instructed to discuss. If the set of topics weren't identical for male-male and female-female phone conversations, it could easily have skewed the results. The first names could have been the participants introducing themselves. Actual transcripts would be really interesting to read.

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[info]differenceblog
2007-08-14 01:46 pm UTC (link)
More about the topics: "To encourage a broad range of vocabulary, Fisher participants are asked to speak on an assigned topic which is selected at random from a list, which changes every 24 hours and which is assigned to all subjects paired on that day. Some topics were inherited or refined from previous Switchboard studies while others are new."

And I'm unobservant, they did report some demographics:
"previous studies have shown that in the United States females join such studies more frequently and participate more fully that males. Previous studies have struggled to attain a 60/40 female to male ration. In Fisher, gender is better balanced with females making just 53% of all calls.
In order to model the speaker population fully, age variation is also important. Many previous studies of conversational telephone speech have exploited college student populations. In Fisher, 38% of subjects are aged 16-29 while 45% are aged 30-49 and 17% are over 50."

The regional dialects were surprisingly closely divided between North, Midland, South, and Western accents.

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[info]differenceblog
2007-08-14 02:05 pm UTC (link)
I found a list of some of the topics used in the Fisher calls on the LDC website:

http://projects.ldc.upenn.edu/EARS/Fisher/topics.html

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[info]differenceblog
2007-08-14 05:00 pm UTC (link)
If anyone is interested in assessing the topics for gender bias, I've put a poll about it in my personal LJ:

http://dan4th.livejournal.com/883384.html

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[info]differenceblog
2007-08-14 02:45 pm UTC (link)
Oh, I should mention that greetings/introductions were removed from the transcripts.

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[info]detonate_for_me
2007-08-14 02:30 pm UTC (link)
Man, I never thought I'd get a definitive fucking answer as to why everyone on the internet assumes I'm a dude! That's some funny shit.

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[info]differenceblog
2007-08-14 02:32 pm UTC (link)
obviously it's because you don't talk about your husband, husband's or boyfriend's gosh-darn cute craft coupons. *stabs self in eye*

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[info]deadkytty9
2007-08-14 02:36 pm UTC (link)
Shit, I don't even know anyone named "Linda." Obviously, I must be male. I wish the internet had told me sooner!

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[info]differenceblog
2007-08-14 02:41 pm UTC (link)
How about Ben, Steve, or Matt?

My gmail contacts tell me I have
2 Bens
2 Steves
2 Matts
1 Linda

(among those people I can actually identify - I have a lot of contact addresses that I don't have any idea where I picked them up. I don't purge my address book ever.)

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[info]deadkytty9
2007-08-14 02:46 pm UTC (link)
I'm not currently in contact with any Bens or Steves, but I've known a few in the past (and I can't think of any Lindas I've met at all). I have enough Matts in my phone that I have to give them nicknames, though they are still less numerous than the omnipresent Mikes.

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[info]differenceblog
2007-08-14 02:46 pm UTC (link)
Hm. I wonder if people were encouraged to use pseudonyms for privacy reasons. If so, I wonder if the instructions read something like "When speaking to your partner, you should choose a common name that is not your own, like Ben, Matt, Steve, and Linda, Agnes, or Mildred"

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[info]ukelele
2007-08-14 04:00 pm UTC (link)
"Linda" was a top 10 girls' name from 1940 through 1965, and #1 for six years running, according to the social security database (it's much less common these days). My first thought when I saw it on the list was "oh, they must have included some older people in their study".

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[info]differenceblog
2007-08-14 04:03 pm UTC (link)
They did indeed! (well spotted)
"45% are aged 30-49 and 17% are over 50"

a nice change from the "students in an introductory psychology course" samples that I'm used to reading.

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[info]ukelele
2007-08-14 04:15 pm UTC (link)
Yeah, I had to appreciate their sample.

(Thanks! I guess years of being obsessive about baby name popularity is good for something. ;)

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[info]detonate_for_me
2007-08-14 02:38 pm UTC (link)
Or breastfeeding. I never talk about that.

For a long time I thought it might be due to my refusal to pepper my comments with qualifiers and emoticons. Is that inherently misogynist?

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[info]differenceblog
2007-08-14 02:39 pm UTC (link)
<.< I'm not sure about this, but I'm probably the wrong person to ask. :P

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[info]dan4th
2007-08-14 02:37 pm UTC (link)
Actually, the internet is slightly different. (This is a teaser for tomorrow!)

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