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This review article addresses the correlation between gender and speaking performance in language learning, focusing on various factors influencing learning outcomes. By analyzing internal and external factors, including gender, the article highlights the complex interplay between personal attributes and environmental conditions in shaping speaking abilities. Additionally, the review discusses the implications for educators in creating inclusive learning environments and adapting teaching approaches to accommodate gender differences. The results underscore the significance of comprehending gender dynamics to improve language skills and support fair educational methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Linguistika: Buletin Ilmiah Program Magister Linguistik Universitas Udayana is the property of Program Studi Magister Linguistik Program Pascasarjana Universitas Udayana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Suvremena Lingvistika is the property of Suvremena Lingvistika and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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]

The influence of standard language varieties on rural dialects is an important factor involved in dialect loss, which is widespread in Europe. In this study, we look at how the three-gender system in the Jämtlandic dialect of Sweden is changing under pressure from the two-gender system of Standard Swedish. The Jämtlandic dialect is an understudied Swedish dialect and an interesting object of study, in part because of the social and economic changes that have occurred over the past century. We performed a survey using profiled stimuli to elicit indefinite articles, definite articles and anaphoric pronouns for 36 target nouns. An analysis was conducted on the traditionalness of gender agreement in the material. We consider linguistic features (traditional gender and type of agreement), as well as sociological features (age, gender, education, geographical location, socioeconomic status, and language attitudes). The results show that most participants maintain the traditional three-gender system to a large degree. Age is the most significant predictor of traditionalness. While the youngest participants show the highest variability in gender assignment, they still retain the three-gender system to some degree. In addition, participants to whom the dialect is very important tend to use more traditional agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

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]

Copyright of Langage & Societe is the property of Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A central issue in the interaction between language and gender in Morocco is urbanity. The written languages, namely Modern Standard Arabic and French, are the languages of institutions which have always been closely linked to urban areas, the typical loci of knowledge and power. Non-written languages, namely Berber and Moroccan colloquial Arabic, are represented as rural and indigenous because they are unlearned and are associated with rural areas, particularly Berber. Unlike the latter, Modern Standard Arabic and French are powerful because they are elitist, given their relation to education, government, and religion (Modern Standard Arabic). Berber and Moroccan Arabic are considered low or powerless because they lack the above-mentioned qualities and they are unimportant for social promotion. Language representations in Morocco are also important because they interact in significant ways with gender. Whereas Modern Standard Arabic and French are associated with public space, Berber and Moroccan Arabic are linked to private space, which happens to be the typical space of women; given the correlation between women, native tongues, and private space. However, with women's access to free education and to work in postcolonial Morocco, the notion of space changed, resulting in the recent mass feminization of the public sphere and women's access to urban languages, i.e., French and Modern Standard Arabic. As women have become more active in public life and the public sphere in general, they are considerably contributing to linguistic change and diversity and intensely instigating significant social changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article includes two parts: the first part is a review of the work which is being done in Valencia in the field of gender, sex(uality), and language. The land of Valencia (the old Kingdom of Valencia), once an independent political entity, is now part of today's constitutional Spain, and its history is a dynamic mixture of religious, cultural, and political traditions. In Valencia two languages and cultures coexist: Spanish (as the dominant language) and Catalan (or Valencian, in a situation of diglossia or asymmetric bilingualism). While both are Romance languages and have important linguistic similarities, Spanish and Catalan differ significantly as to their legal situation, political status, literary tradition, or degree of (in)formality. The second part of the article presents the discussions of a questionnaire on sex-related language (SL), held with two groups of undergraduates at the University of Valencia whose native languages were, respectively, Spanish and Catalan. Students discuss their ideas of what sex(uality) is; the texts or communicative situations in which they use SL; the sex-related words or expressions which they are (un)likely to use; how they are affected by SL (whether they are offended, embarrassed, etc.); their attitudes towards certain SL manifestations (dirty jokes, swearing, insults, or erotic literature); the connection between SL manifestations and gender; and so on. The results reveal, among other things, the overwhelming presence of SL in their (our) daily lives; the undergraduates' willingness to discuss sex-related matters; the virtual non-existence of impoliteness among close friends; the existence of slightly different culture-specific attitudes towards SL; etc. There is also a prominent subtext: sex(uality) is a highly sensitive area in language use and might well serve as a reliable index of concern for the feelings of others and/or a reliable testing ground for how close we judge our friendship/relationship with others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigration is a phenomenon which has deeply upset the life of millions of Maghrebians, as a good many of their narratives show. The analysis of the immigrants' trajectories allows us to point out how language can become the means by which continuity, rupture, and building identities are expressed differently by men and women. This analysis also reveals that men's and women's complementary discourses are, at the same time, common and similar because they reflect their belonging to the same cultural background and the same social class. The principal corpus of the analysis is a documentary titled Mmoires d'immigrs. L'hritage maghrbin, produced by Yamina Benguigui in 1997, which is representative of one of these trajectories. Though audiovisual aids help to examine all the phenomena at the semiotic (gesture, posture, dress) and linguistic levels, in this article, we limit ourselves to a linguistic analysis of the complete narratives published by the producer in a book which came with the film. The analysis deals with both the immigrants' discourse and the discourse made about them by researchers and institutions. Its aim is to show the continuity, rupture, and building identities phenomena which characterize each group and to discuss, how, in front of the same event, specific strategies are adopted by men and women. In this way, we have related, on the one hand, gender, social class, and culture and, on the other hand, continuity, rupture, and building identities and the use of anaphora (we/them) and deictics (here/over there) where the referents are, by nature, dependent on the place where they speak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the methodological challenges that ‘post-modern’ approaches to gender ( Cameron 2005 ) pose for the field of language and gender. If we assume that gender cannot be ‘read off’ the identities of speakers, but rather is a social process by which individuals come to make cultural sense, then how do we best investigate this process? As Stokoe (2005) and Stokoe and Smithson (2002) have argued, it is problematic within such frameworks to conduct research that pre-categorizes individuals as women and men, since it is individuals' constitution as women or men that should be the issue under investigation. Indeed, for Butler (1990: 145), to understand ‘identity as a practice ... is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effects of a rule-bound discourse’ (emphasis in original). This suggests that we attend to cultural norms of intelligibility (i.e. the ‘rule-bound discourse’) and their effects. Following Blommaert (2005) and Woolard (forthcoming) , in this paper I investigate a speech event, a courtroom trial dealing with sexual assault, where understandings of social identities and categories (i.e. ‘norms of intelligibility’) are not only evident in the local talk of speakers and hearers, but also in the recontextualizations of this local talk by powerful institutional representatives (i.e. judges). By examining such recontextualizations of courtroom talk, gender is not ‘read off’ the identities of individuals (i.e. courtroom participants) but rather investigated as it appears in the cultural sense-making frameworks of judges. Moreover, given that judges are the ultimate interpreters of the linguistic representations of courtroom talk, this paper also demonstrates some of the social consequences associated with the performance of culturally intelligible and unintelligible gendered identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how older Moroccan and Turkish children acquire grammatical gender in bilingual acquisition of Dutch. An investigation is made as to the presence of fossilization effect on bilingual children raised in ethnic minority communities, the presence of cross-linguistic influence of the other language in acquiring grammatical gender in Dutch and the difficulty in attributive adjectives and relative pronouns regarding gender agreement with the head noun. The study concludes that bilingual Moroccan and Turkish children demonstrate a serious delay compared to their Dutch peers in terms of accuracy of the right from concerning grammatical gender.

Linguistic variations among the sexes are the result of social attitudes towards the behavior of men and women and of the attitudes men and women themselves consequently have toward language as a social symbol. Men and women speak as they do because they feel a particular kind of language to be appropriate to their sex. As the result of societal impositions and constrains usually transmitted in the process of socialization of individuals, language may be used as an instrument of power and dominance of one sex (usually male) over the other. This is expressed in the use of particular words, the different positions taken in a conversation, and other socially constructed influences. In this paper I discuss data from different studies which show that language plays an important role in the location and maintenance of power differences among the sexes. First, I address the issue of linguistic variations between the sexes within the context of the United States, then discuss its impact and the role of power in conversation. This is followed by a section on the relativity of conversational strategies and approaches to the explanation of language variations across the sexes. Finally, I include a section dedicated to the description of proposed language reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the contribution of grammatical gender to integrating depicted nouns into sentences during on-line comprehension, and whether semantic congruity and gender agreement interact using two tasks: naming and semantic judgement of pictures. Native Spanish speakers comprehended spoken Spanish sentences with an embedded line drawing, which replaced a noun that either made sense or not with the preceding sentence context and either matched or mismatched the gender of the preceding article. In Experiment 1a (picture naming) slower naming times were found for gender mismatching pictures than matches, as well as for semantically incongruous pictures than congruous ones. In addition, the effects of gender agreement and semantic congruity interacted; specifically, pictures that were both semantically incongruous and gender mismatching were named slowest, but not as slow as if adding independent delays from both violations. Compared with a neutral baseline, with pictures embedded in simple command sentences like "Now please say ____", both facilitative and inhibitory effects were observed. Experiment 1b replicated these results with low-cloze gender-neutral sentences, more similar in structure and processing demands to the experimental sentences. In Experiment 2, participants judged a picture's semantic fit within a sentence by button-press; gender agreement and semantic congruity again interacted, with gender agreement having an effect on congruous but not incongruous pictures. Two distinct effects of gender are hypothesised: a "global" predictive effect (observed with and without overt noun production), and a "local" inhibitory effect (observed only with production of gender-discordant nouns). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the effect of language and sex on universal phonetic symbolism. One test of the hypothesis of universal phonetic symbolism is that even though there is no previous knowledge of a language, subjects should be able to tell the relative meaning of a word in an unknown language at greater than a chance degree. The hypotheses that subjects, regardless of sex, would be able to discriminate between the categorical word dimensions in all languages is suggested. English was included to test for word discriminations based on subjects native tongue.

Examines the effects of gender in communication. Involvement of men and women in differential communication behaviors; Beliefs about sex-related language differences to behave in sex-appropriate ways; Use of scree test for termination of factor extraction.

The job interview can be seen as a situation in which gender-specific communicative rules might have a severe social impact. Using four interviews drawn from a larger corpus of actual job interviews recorded in several Dutch companies, this study examines whether the speech patterns of the dominant, male, group prove to be the norm in mixed-gender job interviews. The variables of initiation/response behavior, interruption, and laughter on the part of each participant are analyzed Linguistic features that reflect dominance are examined in all four groups (interviewers and applicants of each sex) and positioned on a scale of conversational styles ranging from most dominant to nondominant. The interaction of gender and status yields a "sociolinguistic hierarchy" in which interviewers rank above applicants, and within each group, males rank above females. This offers support for the argument that a higher-status position does not result as much in a dominant speech style for women as it does for men. Moreover, a lower-status position does not lead as much to a subordinate speech style in men as it does for women. It is argued therefore that not only in everyday conversation, but also in formal speech, differences in sex-specific subcultural communicative rules as well as differences in the communication patterns of different-status persons play an important role in the organization of conversations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to explore the use of Amsterdam vernacular by women and men and to examine what extent the speech differences coincide with, or are influenced by the unequal functions and positions of women and men in society. A summary is presented on the analysis of the main variables of the sociolinguistic study. This design was used to assess the impact of sex relative to actually having children and the women being employed.

The role of sex in language shift has been a central question in many sociolinguistic studies. Discernible differences has been seen in the linguistic behavior of men and women and a number of different views exist on the subject. This article seeks to determine whether women are innovators in the shift to a second language. By conducting a case study of Reindeer Sámi men and women, the methodology is discussed of the measurement and analysis of differences in the language of choice. The differentiation between men and women in this reindeer-herding Sámi community is investigated on how it fits in with arguments that have been presented on differences in linguistic behavior between the sexes.

The discussion about language and sex, specifically women's language and linguistic oppression, has been confused by the imprecise use of the word language. It has taken to mean at least three different things in the debate about women's language and artistic oppression. This article discusses the three different conceptions of language and their relation to language and sex under the following headings: (1)'Shobboleth'; (2) 'The bird cage'; and (3) 'Did your mother served at the palace?'.

"How do we understand and explain the causes of sex difference in language and language use?" This is one of the most difficult but challenging questions at the start of the 1990s. This article is concerned with the meaning of sex differences in language use. Reference is made in particular to recent work on the English tag question. A discussion is given on studies which address an issue of interpretation which is currently a matter for some debate among language and sex researchers.

Sex and politeness are common factors investigated in sociolinguistic research. Most research on these aspects has been done on native populations although these factors also appear as foci in current second-language textbooks. An examination of sexual variation in language use, the use of politeness and second-language acquisition will show there has been relatively little experimental evidence to support such common views as, for example, women are more polite than men. This article was designed to test the hypotheses that women use language more deferentially than men, that both men and women would tend to be more deferent to the opposite sex and that non-native speakers of English differ in their use of deference from native speakers. However, the principal hypothesis, that the situation would influence the degree of deference used, was supported. It appears that sex of speaker cannot be considered a relevant variable in the use of deference. Sex of the addressee, however, can. The type of speaker, whether native or non-native speaker of English, was not found to influence the use of deference. So deference or politeness need not be taught as part of a second-language curriculum.

Sex role influences a diverse range of social behaviors. Since language behavior is central to social interaction, sex role was expected to influence language behavior. Since members of the two sexes experience varying biosocial realities, and since language is a system of communication about realities, language behavior of men and women was expected to differ. Case refers to a system of deep structure constructs which define the relational meaning of a nominal unit to the verb and any other nominal units within a simplex sentence. Hypotheses about cases were deduced from corresponding features of sex role behaviors and case categories. Cases and gender were measured from texts made from videotapes of teachers in classrooms. Reconstruction, a method of inserting grammatically and contextually implicit information into the verbal exchange and classifying the resulting communication into simplex sentences and lexical units, was used to process the language data. Women produced a significantly greater proportion of explicit participative cases than men, thus demonstrating their greater concern with internal psychological states. The greater involvement of men with implementation of action by means of objects was shown by their greater use of instrumental and source cases. Women used significantly more instances of the purposive case. Men produced a significantly greater proportion of objective cases, thus verbally emphasizing things and particularly things acted upon. Agentive and locative cases failed to yield a difference for case realizations by men and women. Implications and conclusions were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]