Paying Careful Attention To Research Literature, Critically Discuss The Proposition That Men And Women Talk Differently.
...talk differently.
To determine whether women and men talk differently there are three main aspects to be considered; firstly does the language actually differ? How does it differ? and why do women and men talk differently. Evidence for this has stemmed from anthropology, dialectology, sociolinguists and social psychology. There is certainly plenty of evidence of differences between women and men in the area of language. For instance, girls are seen as verbally more precocious than boys (Maccoby and Jacklin 1974; Chambers 1992). "Over many years, women have demonstrated an advantage over men in tests of fluency, speaking, sentence complexity, analogy, listening, comprehension of both written and spoken material, vocabulary, and spelling" (Chambers, 1992). By contrast "men are more likely to stutter and too have reading disabilities. They are also much more likely to suffer aphasic speech disorders after brain damage...males are also four times more likely to suffer infantile autism and dyslexia than are females" (Chambers, 1992). It therefore appears that females are initially at an advantage in terms of such verbal skills, and this may be a starting point to why women and men use language differently.
The aspect of gender differences in language can be described by two different categories. One of these being Sex-based differences that is inherent to the language system. Every language has a set of basic elements such as phonemes and morphemes; and a general set of rules that all native speakers have the same knowledge of. However, in some languages some of these rules are dependent
on the gender of the language user (Brouwer, Gerritsen & Haan, 1979) in some languages there is one guideline for males and another for women. More interestingly however is the degree to which there are gender-based differences in this language use, specifically concentrating on...
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