Gender Differences in Language Gender Differences in Language (54990) Psych

Psycholinguistics is defined by www.hyperdictionary.com

as "the branch of cognitive psychology that studies the psychological basis of linguistic competence and performance". One aspect of language skills necessary for full competence is narrative ability - the capacity to tell a coherent story. The research question I have posed relevant to psycholinguistics is how gender differences are reflected in the different ways males and females tell stories.

To answer this question I have selected two articles. The first one - Sex differences in parental influences on children's story-telling skills by George F. Michel (1994) û deals with the effect of gender on the acquisition of narrative skills. The second, by Stephanie L. Dubois (1997), entitled Gender differences in the emotional tone of written sexual fantasies examines the differences in male and female erotic fantasies, which are examples of narrative or story-telling.

The first paper examined will be Sex differences in parental influences on children's story-telling skills by George F. Michel (1994).

Purpose of study: Reasoning that verbal communication between parent and child is affected by the sex of both parent and child, Michel sought to test his hypothesis that sex differences would affect parental story telling and children's acquisition of story-telling skills.

Subjects: The subjects for this study were 30 5-year-old children (15 girls, 15 boys) who told a sto

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ificant difference between women's and men's Evaluation scores remained. Examples of female and male fantasies as scored by the dictionary are found in Tables 3 and 4 respectively. [TABULAR DATA 3-4 NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] DISCUSSION The main purpose of the current study was to examine gender differences in the emotional tone of written sexual fantasies on Activation (arousing or active) and Evaluation (pleasantness) as measured by the Dictionary of Affect in Language (Whissell, 1989). In particular, it was expected that men would score higher than women on the measure of Activation, and women higher than men on Evaluation. The hypothesized gender difference was found for Evaluation, but not for Activation. The observed difference in Evaluation, although statistically significant, did not appear to be substantial. Since this study was intended both to test these hypotheses and to assess the use of the Dictionary for this purpose, both results warrant explanation. The lack of gender difference on the emotional dimension of Activation could be a consequence of the particular attitudes and sexual experience of the participants in the study. Gold and Chick (1988) found that sexually experienced liberal individuals wrote lon
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Correlation Measures, Note RISA, Mercer Mayer, Parental Measures, Affect Language, Mullis Mullis, Byrne White, Gold Chick, Koch Michel, Language Whissell, sexual fantasies, story telling, sd =, sexual fantasy, sex guilt, dictionary affect, gender differences, affect language, dictionary affect language, sex differences, written sexual fantasies, emotional tone, df = 5, tone written sexual, emotional tone written,
Approximate Word count = 9786
Approximate Pages = 39 (250 words per page)