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The observation that gender differences in Japanese language use are becoming less prevalent as women increasingly use 'men's language' appears in popular media from time to time. Some empirical studies support this view. However, such observations are usually based on the consideration of only one or two linguistic features, especially sentence‐final forms and personal pronouns. In contrast, this study analyzes the use of multiple linguistic and paralinguistic features related to gender, regarding them as resources for styling identity. According to our analysis of eight same‐gender and mixed‐gender dyadic conversations of college students, these speakers' use of features other than sentence‐final forms, which we found to vary little by gender, is normatively gendered to a large extent. The study thus demonstrates that the analysis of multiple and multilevel variables enables us to better understand the complex process of styling through the speaker's negotiation of linguistic gender norms in actual practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing studies have described the diachronic development of modals in early periods, or their uses in more recent times. Works with a synchronic orientation have examined modals in contemporary English, and sociolinguistic variation linked to age. There are no studies that investigate gender variation and change of modals in contemporary spoken British English. The present research is a corpus-based investigation that aims to fill this gap and to describe the use of the central modals can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would in the years 1994 and 2014, and gender-based differences/similarities. The analysis has been undertaken on the spoken section of the BNC1994 and the Spoken BNC2014. The analysis reveals that there are limited differences between men and women and ongoing innovation in the years 1994 and 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, I propose that the commentary on Virgil by the grammarian Servius shows us how gender agreement was approached in school texts or school contexts. In focusing on the actual process of Latin composition, his approach differs from the usual one found in ancient Roman grammatical writings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we address gender differences in the host language proficiency of humanitarian migrants. Prior research has produced inconclusive results with regard to women's host language proficiency relative to that of men: sometimes women's proficiency exceeds that of men, sometimes women lag behind men, and sometimes there are no substantial differences. Using data on recent humanitarian migrants in Germany, we investigate factors contributing to similarities and differences in men's and women's language proficiency. We consider gender differences with respect to the family-related factors: marital status, children's ages and children's childcare situations are important for women but not for men. These findings point to the continued relevance of a gendered division of work. It also becomes clear that gendered role expectations are particularly consequential for mothers and wives. Moreover, we find evidence that women are more efficient learners than men are, while they have fewer learning opportunities than men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the words that 265 pre-university (12th grade) English as a foreign language learners produce in response to the prompt 'Food and drink'. Specifically, it aims to (i) ascertain the number of cultural words this sample of learners retrieved overall and in their first responses to the abovementioned word stimulus; (ii) classify the culture these terms represent, i.e., source, target and international, and (iii) account for sex-based differences in cultural word elicitation. Our findings evince that the number of cultural tokens corresponded to one fourth of the total number of the words students retrieved in response to the aforementioned prompt. These tokens mostly belonged to international culture. As for sex-based differences, our data revealed that males obtained higher mean values and retrieved a higher rate of cultural types in their first responses than females did. However, differences between male and female learners in regard with cultural word elicitation were not statistically significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language is one of the most important factors affecting the formation of perceptions, thoughts and behaviors about gender in society. In China, studies on the relationship between gender and language began after the 1980s. The Chinese language, which evolved from pictograms, does not have any prefixes or suffixes indicating gender. However, even though Chinese grammatically does not seem like a sexist language, this does not mean that Chinese is a language that does not demonstrate gender discrimination or classification. Gender discrimination can be reflected in the language in different ways. This article will attempt to answer the question: "How is the inferior position of Chinese women in society reflected in language?" To answer this question, gender discrimination in the Chinese language will be evaluated in terms of Chinese word formation, idioms, proverbs, word order and the third-person singular pronoun. With this objective in mind, this research refers to a Chinese dictionary and uses recent findings about this issue to source the words relating to gender, specifically women. Before analyzing the examples in the Chinese language, it will be beneficial to give a brief background on what kind of language Chinese is. Then, some examples of gender related words, especially consisting of the character? (nu-woman, female), pronouns, proverbs and idioms will be given and examinedز [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigated the effects of English study using smartphone applications (apps) on the speaking performance and perception of EFL university students concerning gender difference. Forty-seven students participated and were required to practice English outside of the classroom using apps for a 10-week period. All participants took pre and post narrative speaking tests based on a series of eight pictures and answered a questionnaire. The findings of the study are as follows. First, there was no significant difference between the male and female students in speaking performance in the post-test. However, statistically significant differences were found between the pre- and post-tests in both groups. Second, the participants responded positively that the practice using an app was interesting and helpful for decreasing anxiety toward English with no significant gender difference. Finally, the students chose an app, 'Cake', as the most preferred one as it included a variety of useful English expressions regularly on various topics. Most participants replied positively about using the apps as a means for speaking practice due to accessibility. The findings suggested that smartphone apps could be useful to provide opportunities for both male and female university students to practice English in an EFL context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tetun Dili is an Austronesian language and one of the two official languages in Timor-Leste, alongside Portuguese with which it has been in contact for centuries. In this detailed study, we describe various aspects of gender in Tetun Dili, in both native and borrowed vocabulary. We identify marked differences between gender marking in native and borrowed Portuguese words, with Tetun prioritizing the feminine, and Portuguese the masculine. We show that through contact with Portuguese, Tetun Dili has also developed "marginal" gender, with grammatical gender agreement being optional but increasingly common for Portuguese loans, mainly in the acrolect. Grammatical agreement is also spreading to a handful of non-Portuguese words, to which there is evidence of incipient grammatical gender assignment. Some comparisons are made with developments in Chamorro and Tagalog, two Austronesian languages heavily influenced by Spanish (closely related to Portuguese), for which gender contact effects have previously been described in some detail. We conclude with a set of more general typological observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate cross-linguistic lexical and syntactic influences in grammatical gender in early bilingualism, we tested 12 simultaneous, 12 early successive bilingual Russian-German children, and 15 monolingual German children aged 8-9 years. An elicited production task in German shows that all bilingual children assign target gender to nouns, irrespective of whether nouns belong to the same (gender-congruent) or different gender class in German and Russian. In visual-world eye tracking, we tested whether children use gender marking on German articles or adjectives to anticipate upcoming nouns. Like monolingual children, simultaneous bilingual children made predictive use of gender irrespective of gender congruency. In contrast, the successive bilingual children showed predictive gender processing only for lexically congruent nouns. We argue that the asynchronous acquisition of the L2 in successive bilinguals implicates that L2 gender is first accessed through the L1 lexicon. In contrast, syntactic differences between Russian and German gender do not affect early bilingual processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of a larger study, whose main objective is to postulate the existence of intonation differences between linguistic regions of Chile in the issuance of subordinate clauses substantive objective, this work exposes a characterization of three types of pauses (silence, elongations and vacillations) found inside the sentence structures listed above, issued by professional speakers from Iquique and Punta Arenas. The main purpose of the study was to determine the existence of differences in the types of pauses observed in relation to the sentence complexity analyzed, the gender of the informants and their geographical origin. For this, a total of 100 statements taken from interviews of 37 professionals (men and women) born in both cities were analyzed. The results indicated that there were differences in the observed pauses, in relation to the types of sentences analyzed, the geographic origin and gender of the informants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examined gender gap in Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) Reading and mediators of the gender gap in a Finnish sample (n = 1,309). We examined whether the gender gap in PISA Reading performance can be understood via the effects of reading fluency, achievement behaviour (mastery orientation and task‐avoidant behaviour) or the amount of time spent with leisure reading and homework. Girls outperformed boys in all measures except for achievement behaviour. The models explaining PISA Reading were not different: For boys and girls, reading fluency, mastery orientation, leisure book reading and homework explained the variance in PISA Reading scores. The gender effect on PISA Reading was, however, for the most part mediated by differences in reading fluency. These findings suggest that while mastery orientation, homework activity and leisure book reading are concurrent predictors of PISA Reading over and above reading fluency, they do not explain gender difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work explores the order of linguistic references to the two genders (e.g., men and women vs. women and men). It argues that a gender is more likely to be mentioned first when it is perceived to have higher relevance in a context rather than lower relevance, and audiences assign stronger relevance to a party when the party is mentioned first rather than second. Studies 1-3 document the current prevalence of male-first conjoined phrases in the public (but not family) domain and link the pattern to historical changes in women’s public presence over the 20th century. Study 4 shows that contextual relevance cues affect the odds of first mention, such that people are more likely to refer to a woman before a man, when the two are in a primary school classroom rather than a corporate office. At the same time, Studies 4 and 5 find that people often choose to reproduce collectively preferred word order patterns (e.g., men and women). Studies 6 and 7 show that these choices matter because people assign more relevance to a party when it comes first rather than second in a conjoined phrase. Overall, this work offers theoretical grounding and empirical evidence for word order as a means of expressing and perpetuating gender stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings together the study of sociolinguistic variation and the area of grammatical analysis by investigating demonstrative cleft constructions in spoken British English such as That's what I wanted to talk about and This is where I saw him. Using the Spoken BNC2014S, I ask whether speaker characteristics, including gender, age, education and occupation, might be correlated with the use of demonstrative clefts and with various aspects of their structure (preference for the distal or proximal demonstrative pronoun, use of negative polarity, and use of stance adverbs). Findings suggest that in British English, demonstrative cleft use is more likely to be present in the speech of male compared to female speakers, working adults in higher-skilled occupations compared to semi-skilled adults, and in adults of middle age compared to younger adults. This work shows that even highly abstract grammatical constructions can be sensitive to speaker preferences and linguistic communicative style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late twentieth century, the usage of intensifiers, such as absolutely, very or slightly, has been investigated in relation to gender. Whereas previous literature has widely agreed that women and men do indeed use intensifiers differently, there has been some disagreement as to which gender uses them more frequently. Taking up this discussion, this study explores authentic data provided in the Spoken BNC2014S by investigating 39 intensifiers. After establishing the ten most frequently used intensifiers by women and men, these are subcategorized and investigated for gender and age effects. The results generally support earlier findings, however, they also illustrate that there is much interindividual variation and variation regarding individual intensifiers and that there are fascinating interactions with other variables such as age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how age, gender, social class and dialect influence how frequently speakers of British English use intensifiers (e.g. very) in private conversations and whether this has changed over the last two decades. With data drawn from over 600 speakers and 4M words included in the Spoken British National Corpus (1994 and 2014 Sample), it is the most comprehensive study of intensifier usage to date, taking into account 111 intensifier variants. Results show that, in most age groups and social classes, men use intensifiers less frequently than women, and gender differences have diminished to a very limited extent, notably for the middle class. Moreover, intensification rate has increased across the board over time. This could be due to a shift towards a stereotypically more feminine communicative style as the perception of gender roles has changed, a process by which the middle class might have been particularly affected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the importance of gender differences in the voice, sociolinguists have not paid sufficient attention to the sociolinguistic processes through which phonetic resources are mobilized in the construction of a gendered voice. This article argues that gender differences in the voice—including those influenced by physiology—are best understood as elements of sociolinguistic style rather than static properties. With a focus on transgender speakers in the early stages of masculinizing hormone therapy, the analysis demonstrates the complex interrelationship of the gendered meanings attributable to characteristics like fundamental frequency and /s/. Trans speakers challenge systems for categorizing voices as female or male, which assume that different aspects of the gendered voice will pattern together in normative ways. Yet a voice's gender is not a unidimensional feature, but a cluster of features that take on meaning only in context with one another, leaving them open for recombination and change through stylistic bricolage. (Transgender, style, gender, voice, pitch, sibilants) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose: We investigated cross-linguistic differences in fundamental frequency range (FFR) in Welsh-English bilingual speech. This is the first study that reports gender-specific behavior in switching FFRs across languages in bilingual speech. Method: FFR was conceptualized as a behavioral pattern using measures of span (range of fundamental frequency—in semitones—covered by the speaker's voice) and level (overall height of fundamental frequency maxima, minima, and means of speaker's voice) in each language. Results: FFR measures were taken from recordings of 30 Welsh-English bilinguals (14 women and 16 men), who read 70 semantically matched sentences, 35 in each language. Comparisons were made within speakers across languages, separately in male and female speech. Language background and language use information was elicited for qualitative analysis of extralinguistic factors that might affect the FFR. Conclusions: Cross-linguistic differences in FFR were found to be consistent across female bilinguals but random across male bilinguals. Most female bilinguals showed distinct FFRs for each language. Most male bilinguals, however, were found not to change their FFR when switching languages. Those who did change used different strategies than women when differentiating FFRs between languages. Detected cross-linguistic differences in FFR can be explained by sociocultural factors. Therefore, sociolinguistic factors are to be taken into account in any further study of language-specific pitch setting and cross-linguistic differences in FFR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This note tries to assess the syntactic locus of grammatical Gender in the nominal structure with evidence mainly drawn from Spanish. Data from ellipsis resolution and its licensing in a variety of contexts, and for different types of syntactic objects, suggest the conjecture that noun classifying devices, such as grammatical Gender, may constitute the inflectional correlate of hierarchically organized, and possibly universal, nominality descriptors. Such descriptors would be coded in the structural space that, under different theoretical proposals, has been labelled as 'lexical phase', 'first phase' or 'little-n' space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a feminist literary analysis of the representation of shame in Dominique Botha’sValsrivierand it demonstrates how shame manifests itself in the spaces where gender, sexuality, race and class intersect. The study of shame offers myriad analytical possibilities and these have largely been left unexplored in scholarly engagements with Botha’s critically acclaimed text. By focusing on the embodied experiences of shame of the character of Dominique and those of a number of other, often peripheral, characters, I contend that the politics of shame are as crucial to understanding these women’s lived realities as those of race and class. Because of its very nature, a number of challenges crop up when one attempts to broach the topic of shame, not least of which is the fact that it makes people extremely uncomfortable. I argue that it is crucial that feminist critics move beyond the desire to turn away so that we can turn the scholarly gaze on shame in order to expose it to analysis. This article has entered into this uncomfortable and challenging conversation by considering how selected female literary characters experience shame at the intersections of gender, race, sexuality and class. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nominal classification remains a fascinating topic but in order to make further progress we need greater clarity of definition and analysis. Taking a Canonical Typology approach, we use canonical gender as an ideal against which we can measure the actual gender systems we find in the languages of the world. Building on previous work on canonical morphosyntactic features, particularly on how they intersect with canonical parts of speech, we establish the distinctiveness of gender, reflected in the Canonical Gender Principle: In a canonical gender system, each noun has a single gender value. We develop three criteria associated with this principle, which together ensure that canonically a noun has exactly one gender value; we give examples of non-canonicity for each criterion, thus gradually building the typology. This is the essential groundwork for a comprehensive typology of nominal classification: the Canonical Typological approach allows us to tease apart clusterings of properties and to characterize individual properties with respect to a canonical ideal, rather than requiring us to treat the entire system as belonging to a single type. This approach is designed to facilitate comparisons of different noun classification systems across languages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses a kind of ellipsis in Cayuga (Northern Iroquoian) known as stripping. We show that while person, number and gender feature mismatches are generally tolerated in this construction, gender mismatches are not tolerated with most predicate nouns referring to humans. Merchant (2014) discusses gender mismatches under ellipsis in Greek human nominals and proposes that certain human nouns are lexically encoded to presuppose the gender of their respective referents. We show that Merchant's general proposal can be accommodated to the Cayuga facts, the specifics of his proposal cannot be carried over. We reject the lexicalist stance in Merchant's proposal and instead propose that human noun roots in Cayuga carry an interpretable humanness feature [H], which is obligatorily valued for gender. It is this interpretable [H] feature that gives rise to the lack of tolerance for gender mismatches on human predicate nouns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has led to conflicting notions of the representation of L1 and L2 grammatical gender systems in the mental lexicon: under the gender-integrated representation hypothesis the L1 and L2 gender nodes are shared, while these nodes are language-specific in the gender autonomous representation hypothesis. We address this debate, extending this research to L1 and L2 systems mismatched in number of gender values. In this study, Spanish-German bilinguals performed an L2 picture-naming task in which gender congruency (congruent, incongruent and neuter) between L1 and L2 nouns was manipulated. Latencies were shorter for gender-congruent than gender-incongruent nouns, and latencies for the German neuter nouns were also shorter than those for the masculine-feminine incongruent nouns. These gender congruency effects support the gender-integrated representation hypothesis and indicate a unique representation of the gender value not present in the L1 which interferes with the response significantly less than when the incongruency is between gender values present in both languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two experiments, this article investigates the predictive processing of gender agreement in adult second language (L2) acquisition. We test (1) whether instruction on lexical gender can lead to target predictive agreement processing and (2) how variability in lexical gender representations moderates L2 gender agreement processing. In a pretest–posttest design, Experiment 1 trained 34 intermediate first language (L1) English learners of German on gender assignment. After training, the L2 group showed predictive gender processing; yet, performance correlated with accuracy in gender assignment. Experiment 1 suggests that target knowledge of lexical gender in the L2 lexicon is a prerequisite for predictive use of gender agreement in L2 syntax: Non-target gender assignment would lead to partially erroneous gender prediction such that use of gender agreement is costly for the parser and therefore abandoned. To test this account, Experiment 2 investigated predictive processing in 42 German native speakers who have target-like gender assignment and agreement. In a between-group design, one group received target input and the other received filler items with non-target gender assignment. The latter group subsequently stopped using gender agreement predictively in all experimental trials. Hence, L2 problems with gender agreement can be emulated in native processing. Taken together, the experiments suggest that variability of lexical gender assignment affects processing of gender agreement in natives and non-natives. We interpret the findings in the context of current probabilistic theories of implicit learning and processing adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Teaching reflection and administering reflective writing assignments to students are widely practiced and discussed in medical education and health professional education. However, little is known about how medical students use language to construct their narratives. Exploring students' linguistic patterns in their reflective writings can facilitate understanding the scope and facets of their reflections and their representational or communication approaches to share their experiences. Moreover, research findings regarding gender differences in language use are inconsistent. Therefore, we attempted to examine how females and males differ in their use of words in reflective writing within our research circumstance to detect the unique and gender-specific approaches to learning and their applications. Methods: We analyzed the linguistic profiles of psychological process categories in the reflective writings of medical students and examined the difference in word usage between male and female medical students. During the first year of a clinical rotation, 60 fifth-year medical students wrote reflective narratives regarding pediatric patients and the psychosocial challenges faced by the patients and their family members. The narratives were analyzed using the Chinese version of Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (CLIWC), a text analysis software program. Multivariate procedures were applied for statistical analysis. Results: Cognitive words were most pervasive, averaging 22.16%, whereas perceptual words (2.86%) were least pervasive. Female students used more words related to positive emotions and sadness than did male students. The male students exceeded the female students only in the space category. The major limitation of this study is that CLIWC cannot directly acquire contextual text meanings; therefore, depending on the research topic, further qualitative study of the given texts might be necessary. Conclusions: To enhance students' empathy toward the psychosocial issues faced by patients and their family members, students should be encouraged to explore the domain of psychological processes by identifying and expressing their affective and perceptual experiences. Researchers in future studies should use outcome measures such as self-awareness or empathy to determine the overall effectiveness of reflective writing and how changes in linguistic patterns affect such outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In native speakers of gender-marking languages, mechanisms of gender production appear to be affected by the morphophonological cues to gender present in the noun phrase. This influence is manifested in higher levels of production accuracy when more transparent cues to gender are present in comparison to when they are not. The goal of the present study was to examine the role of morphophonological cues to gender in the production of gender agreement in native speakers and second language learners of Spanish in light of the Marking and Morphing account of agreement (Eberhard et al., 2005). Participants repeated and completed complex subject noun phrases with head nouns that varied in gender and gender-marking transparency. Analyses of accuracy rates along with Marking and Morphing model simulations of the results indicated that, contrary to previous findings, native speakers were not affected by gender-marking transparency. However, based on model simulations, second language (L2) learners were affected by the morphophonological form of the head noun. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose: to study and verify that the phonological disorder is a continuum of language delay, in other words, if children with atypical phonological development previously had some delay in language development. Methods: the data were collected and organized into two groups, Group 1 comprised 10 children with language delay, speech therapy performed for stimulation and progressed after treatment, and then changed to the speech sector. Already Group2 consists of 554 subjects who arrived with phonological features and thus were diagnosed after the evaluations. Results: the findings of this study showed no significant association between sex and diagnosis, and the distribution between boys and girls was similar. In the analysis performed between age of onset of first words were not found significant results. However, the comparison between age of onset of first words and diagnosis were significant result, and the age of onset in the group with language delay, later than in other diagnostic hypotheses. Conclusion: the results of this study support the literature, because the phonological refers to a change in the phonological level only, rather than a continuum of language delay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: verifying how the initial lexical acquisition occurs in children with typical development, regarding to types and tokens of the lexical items. Furthermore, one wants to verify if the noun bias hypothesis occurs, and in what version, strong or weak. Methods: the sample consisted of 20 children, male and female, with typical language development. This research covered ages from 1:0 to 1:11 (years: months) divided in three age groups (1:0 - 1:3;29, 1:4 - 1:7;29, 1:8 - 1:11;29). Audio data from spontaneous speech were collected, and after, lexical analysis was performed regarding to types and tokens produced. The Statistical tests Mann Whitney; Kruskal -- Wallis and Wilcoxon were used, with significance level p< 0.05. Results: no statistical significance was found to the variables regarding to sex. However, statistical difference was found between the age group 1 in relation to 2 and 3 to the majority of variables. Furthermore, one verified prevalence of content words in the age groups 2 and 3. The prevalence of nouns over verbs in all age groups was observed. Conclusion: the initial lexical acquisition in children with typical development occurs gradually according to the increase of age. In this period the sex variable doesn't influence in the linguistic performance. Furthermore, the noun bias hypothesis was confirmed in its weak version, confirming the thesis that inspired this research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: to evaluate the gender's influence in the development of language skills in children with severe to profound sensorineural deafness after cochlear implant. Methods: thirty children, 12 females and 18 males, aged between 8 years and 1 month and 10 years, with severe to profound congenital bilateral sensorineural deafness with cochlear implant were studied. The language structures analyzed were semantics, morphosyntax and phonology. The assessment tool used was the Observation Grid Language - school level. Results: the average hearing age was of 72 months for females and 72.7 months for males. The scores obtained in the three structures were statistically similar between genders. Into each structure, the comparison of each test, were also similar. Conclusions: gender did not influence the development of oral language in children with cochlear implants, in the three linguistic structures studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on four linguistic domains, purpose/manner of communication, preferring local dialects, politeness, and volume of use, this study aims to explore how gender is reflected in messages produced by Iranian female and male students. A corpus of 2,116 text messages was analyzed. Participants also filled out a questionnaire on how frequently they used text messaging. Results indicated females to be more prolific users of messaging. As far as function is concerned, while texts produced by females were for the most part relational, involving an emotional language, males frequently employed messages for informative-transactional functions which were less wordy and in more authoritative language. In addition, males were more likely than females to employ their local dialect and forms considered less polite. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Highlights: [•] The gender system of Amharic (Ethiosemitic) relies heavily on natural gender. [•] It is thus difficult for previous analyses to account for. [•] I propose natural gender is an interpretable feature on the nominalizing head n. [•] Arbitrary gender on inanimates is an uninterpretable version of the same feature. [•] Additional evidence from gender and number interactions support the analysis. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] Pontic Greek has developed an innovative semantic agreement system. [•] Targets controlled by non-human and inanimate nouns appear in the neuter form. [•] Gender conflicts in non-prototypical masculine and feminine nouns triggered semantic agreement. [•] Semantic agreement spread following the path of Corbett’s Agreement Hierarchy. [•] Semantic agreement paved the way for the loss of gender in Cappadocian and Pharasiot. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] Subjects of pancake sentences are headed by a null neuter classifier. [•] Null neuter classifiers in MSc lack a number feature. [•] The absence of number gives rise to a non-countable reading. [•] The appearance of MSc pancake sentences is due to a general gender transition. [•] The Mainland Scandinavian gender system transition started in West Jutlandic. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] A formal implementation of Corbett’s (1991) controller vs. target gender distinction is proposed. [•] The proposed system is checked against the gender systems of Romanian and Albanian. [•] The ambigeneric analysis holds for Albanian but not for Romanian. [•] Romanian neuters are better described as unmarked for gender. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] Grammatical gender is a complex feature of natural languages. [•] The paper discusses ways to assess the degree of complexity of individual gender systems. [•] The complexity of gender systems can differ along three dimensions: gender values, assignment rules and morphological expression. [•] Domains differ in whether or not complexity equals difficulty in language acquisition. [•] Higher complexity of expression facilitates rather than hinders acquisition [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Studies of Franco-American French (FAF) suggest that this obsolescing variety spoken in the northeastern United States is resistant to grammatical changes that are typical in situations of language contact, restriction, and shift. Here we address the issue through an examination of gender agreement in descriptive adjectives. Our analysis of data from four communities shows that a tendency toward morphological reduction in the direction of the masculine variant that has been widely documented in the popular French of France and in many North American varieties is widespread in terms of number of speakers that exhibit this behaviour, but infrequent overall. Variation is conditioned by the nature of the final segment and by speaker community of residence and education in French. We relate these factors to widespread negative attitudes about FAF that have contributed to a communitywide shift to English on the one hand and to grammatical conservatism among speakers who have maintained French on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of globalization has forced workers (essentially white collars) to learn foreign languages and break linguistic barriers. In most cases, Europeans have chosen English as a second language. But English is not the only language that has an economic impact on international trade. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effect of the most important foreign languages used at the workplace on wages of men and women, both at the mean and along the wage distribution, in Northern and Southern Europe ( Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy and Spain). Workers from both genders benefit from a premium, but there are marked differences between North European and South European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the effects of grammatical and stereotypical gender information on the comprehension of human referent role nouns among bilinguals of a grammatical (French) and a natural gender language (English). In a sentence evaluation paradigm, participants judged the acceptability of a gender-specific sentence referring to either a group of women or men following a sentence containing the plural form of a role noun female (e.g., social workers), male (e.g., surgeons) or neutral (e.g., musicians) in stereotypicality. L1 French and L1 English bilinguals were tested both in French and English. The results showed that bilinguals construct mental representations of gender associated with the language of the task they are engaged in, shifting representations as they switch languages. Specifically, in French, representations were male-dominant (i.e., induced by the masculine form), whereas in English, they were stereotype-based. Furthermore, the results showed that the extent to which representations shifted was modulated by participants’ proficiency in their L2, with highly proficient L2 participants resembling native speakers of the L2 and less proficient L2 participants being influenced more by their native language. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this article is to reflect on linguistic sexism, a kind of discrimination that has women as an object and language as an instrument. Sexist language either ignores women, or treats them as men, or represents them as an exception; such a use of language, which excludes or minimizes some social subjects, linguistically represents their self-denial and contributes to the permanence of common prejudices. The article analyzes two aspects of linguistic sexism: some asymmetries between masculine gender and feminine gender in the Spanish language; as well as some discriminatory linguistic expressions found in academic documents in the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico that hide or diminish the professional or student image of woman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A well-established difference between male and female voices is the greater degree of breathy voice used by women. The acoustic measure that has most commonly been used to validate this difference is the amplitude of the first two harmonics relative to each other, as well as in relation to other spectral parameters. This paper suggests that sex-specific differences in the harmonic expression of nasality combined with the high likelihood of nasality being present in the open vowels, which have often been used to minimise the effect of F1 on the lowest harmonics, make H1 and H2 inappropriate reference points to measure sex-specific differences in breathiness. The relative harmonic amplitude patterns are replicated using formant synthesis (SenSyn). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Powerless language influences how media consumers perceive the believability and trustworthiness of news sources. Past studies have suggested females use more powerless language, which can negatively influence credibility. However, previous research also suggests powerless language may be preferred in certain contexts. To investigate powerless language use in written health media, a content analysis investigated health-related articles in issues of 12 magazines between October 2008 and September 2009. Analysis compared differences in powerless language frequencies relative to three variables: biological sex of the author, biological sex of the audience, and the magazine's overall topic focus. Female authors and health-focused magazines used more powerless language than male authors and generic-focused magazines, and powerless language was more often directed towards a female audience than a male audience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the author compares two Spanish translations of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Taking into account that Spanish is a language in which words referring to human beings have a feminine and a masculine form, and grammatical gender corresponds to sex, all translators must interrogate the sex of the referent in order to translate gendered words. They are thus compelled to assign sex to genderless forms in the source text. Patriarchal translation has a long tradition of devaluing and excluding the feminine in this process, as the author demonstrates here by revealing how Jorge Luis Borges translated the pronouns you and we in Woolf’s essay. In contrast, in her feminist translation of the essay, María Milagros Rivera-Garretas not only chooses the gender which most accurately represents the likely intended meaning of the source text, but recovers its message and legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper fills in the gap in the literature by providing an acoustic analysis of rhotics in Persian and considers the social variables gender and register. Through the acoustic analysis of 807 tokens, it demonstrates that that there are a number of rhotic variants in Persian in different positions in the word and finds evidence of degemination in coda position, against previous accounts. Furthermore, it suggests that on the one hand, Tehrani-Persian speaking men and women's rhotic production patterns with those of Arabic societies as men favor rhotics with more complex articulations. On the other hand it questions whether the behavior of Tehrani-Persian speaking men and women conforms to established sociolinguistic norms regarding prestige and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Specific language impairment (SLI) is known to aggregate in families. Debate exists on whether the male sex presents an additional risk for SLI. This meta-analysis examined whether there is a sex ratio difference in the risk for impairment among family members of an SLI proband and whether this is mediated by assessment method (direct assessment via psychometric tests vs. indirect assessment via questionnaire/interview) or relative type (sibling vs. parent). Method: Twelve studies met inclusion criteria, including 11 parent and 9 sibling samples. Risk ratios, indicating relative risk for language difficulties for males versus females, were calculated as a function of assessment method and relative type. Results: Direct assessments identified a male predominance of language impairment, with a pooled risk ratio of 1.73 for siblings (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.20-2.52) and 1.54 for parents (95% CI: 1.14-2.07). No sex differences were observed for studies using indirect testing methods, with mean risk ratios of 1.12 (0.85-1.48) and 1.17 (0.92-1.49) for sibling and parent samples, respectively. Conclusion: A predominance of affected males among family members is observed when using direct assessments only. This finding is interpreted with reference to the strengths and weaknesses of different assessment methodologies and what sex differences may indicate about the biological mechanisms underlying the SLI phenotype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although women have been stereotyped as more emotionally expressive than men, the extant empirical evidence on sex differences in the expression and use of affective communication is equivocal. The authors examined the influence of sex and context on the expression and use of computer-mediated affective language in a sample of young adults. A total of 56 undergraduates (28 males, 28 females) were paired in same-sex dyads and randomly assigned to either a webcam or no webcam condition. The participants engaged in a 10-min free chat online conversation in the laboratory. Transcripts were objectively coded for the use of affective communication and traditional linguistic and conversational style measures. The analyses revealed separate significant Sex x Webcam Condition interactions on the affective quality of language used and the expression of computer-mediated emotion. Men in the webcam condition used significantly less active words than men in the no webcam condition and less than women in the webcam condition. Women in the webcam condition used significantly more emoticons than women in the no webcam condition or men in either condition. Men and women did not differ in their use of emoticons in the no webcam condition. Results suggest that sex differences in the use and expression of computermediated affective communication are context specific in an undergraduate sample. Findings are discussed in terms of their larger implications for understanding sex differences in the expression and use of emotion in face-to-face (FTF) social interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Again and again, attempts have been made to find correlates of sex/gender differences in the human brain. Despite the insistence with which differences have been stated, empirical results have not been unequivocal: evidence for and against the influence of sex in the makeup of men''s and women''s brains has been presented. This article focuses on the relevance of sex/gender related differences in fMRI research, especially with regard to language processing. By discussing some crucial criteria from fMRI examinations, we demonstrate the existence of paradigmatic, methodological and statistical defaults that interfere with assessing the presence or absence of sex/gender differences. These criteria are, among others, the use of contrast analyses, the function of the variable sex/gender as a co-item and the “publication bias”. It is argued that dealing with the sex/gender variable will, at least to some degree, inevitably lead to the detection of differences rather than to the detection of similarities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In 4 experiments, we examine the perceptions of metaphor use in interactive communication (e-mails or chat transcriptions). We find metaphor use, especially novel metaphor, serves as a cue that the interlocutor is male. This effect is not based on knowledge of interlocutor gender per se but is driven by metaphor use. The findings were most robust when participants were directly asked about interlocutor gender but also were found in indirect questions about the interlocutors. We take these data as contrary to an earlier speculation that male use of metaphor is a form of “risk taking” and as more consistent with the notion that metaphor use implicates speaker intentions and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]