SEMINAR:
  Linguistics Seminar
  - Psycholinguistic gender differences in literary fiction
		
Fri, 14 Sep 2018 11:00 - Seminar Room 2.63
		
Severi Luoto
Although psychological gender differences have been reported in a
variety of domains, sometimes amounting to psychologists comparing them
with the distance between Mars and Venus (Del Giudice et al., 2012, PloS
One), linguists still debate about the magnitude of such differences in
language use. I present findings from a corpus linguistic study that
employed computerised text analysis methods to examine gender
differences in British, Irish, and American literary canons of the 19th
and early 20th centuries, comprising c. 15 million words. Very large
(Cohen’s d > 1) gender differences were found for article use,
personal pronoun use, positive emotion words, social words, and words
reflecting analytical thinking. Other psycholinguistic categories showed
gender differences ranging from negligible to large (0 < d < 1). These
quantitative findings on 132 novels provide further challenges to the
gender similarities hypothesis whilst supporting the sex differences
hypothesis arising from and supported by evolutionary science. The
present findings extend existing scientific knowledge on human gender
differences to psycholinguistic and biocultural domains.


		
For more information:
  Maia Ponsonnet
  maia.ponsonnet@uwa.edu.au

Starts       : Fri, 14 Sep 2018 11:00
Ends         : Fri, 14 Sep 2018 12:30
		
Last Updated : Thu, 13 Sep 2018 09:04