Male-female discourse difference in terms of lexical density

Abstract

The development of gender roles often begins as early as infancy. Being at the centre, gender manifests itself in any subtle and trivial aspect of our social life. From the time we are very small, it is ever present in any aspect of our life, in conversation, humor, conflict and so on. The overwhelming studies on the differences between men/women speech style represents the significance of the issue. The present study is an attempt to investigate whether the speaker's gender (being a male/female) contributes to the lexical density of their discourse. In other words, whether the lexical density of discourse is sensitive to the gender of the speaker? It is a data-driven, empirical study based on the transcribed recorded talk-in interactions between men and women. Text Content Analysis Tool (TCAT) was used to measure the lexical density of male/female speaker's discourse and to count the total number of words used by male/female speakers. The results of Chi-square test show that there is not a statistically significance difference between the lexical density of men and women discourse (p >0.157). However, there is a negative relationship between the lexical density of discourse and discourse length. In other words, the more word counts (689 words) the lower lexical density (0.33.67%) and vice versa the less word used by the speaker (31) the higher lexical density of the discourse (90.32%). © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2013.