Women Get Interrupted More—Even By Other

Women
S HUTTE RS TO CK

The idea that men and women use language

differently is conventional wisdom—
appearing everywhere
from Cosmo and Glamour to The Journal of
Psychology and Anthropological Linguistics.
Recent research, though, suggests that the most
important variable is not the sex of the person
doing the talking, but that of the person being
spoken to. According to a paper published
Sunday in the online edition of the Journal of
Language and Social Psychology, both men and
women are more likely to interrupt and to use
dependent clauses when speaking with a woman
than with a man. Adrienne Hancock, a
researcher at the Department of Speech and
Hearing Sciences at George Washington
University, and Benjamin Rubin, a Master’s
student, recruited 20 male and 20 female
volunteers and instructed them to engage in two
short conversations, one with a man and one
with a woman. Hancock gave the volunteers’
“conversation partners” scripts about reality
television or cell phone use to guide the
dialogue. “We tried to get gender-neutral
topics,” explained Hancock. “And then there
were counter-balances: Sometimes the speaker
would talk to the male about reality TV, and
sometimes to the female.”

Hancock and Rubin then transcribed the

conversations and analyzed them for ten
linguistic markers suspected of differing in men
and women’s speech. For instance, studies have
suggested that women are more likely to use
“hedges” (words like “probably” or “kind of”),
intensive adverbs (“very,” “extremely”), fillers
(“uhh,” “I mean”) and tag questions (the “isn't
it” in: “It’s cold out, isn’t it?”). In contrast with
previous research, Hancock and Rubin didn’t
find any significant differences in the way men
and women spoke—but they did find that having
male or female conversation partners elicited
different results. “When speaking with a female,
participants interrupted more and used more
dependent clauses than when speaking with a
male,” they wrote. Over the course of each three-
minute conversation, women, on average,
interrupted men just once, but interrupted other
women 2.8 times. Men interrupted their male
conversation partner twice, on average, and
interrupted the woman 2.6 times.

Every single participant used more dependent

clauses when speaking with their female
conversation partner. Dependent clauses, which
contain a subject and a verb but can’t stand
alone, tend to appear in longer, more complex
sentences—the kind we might expect women to
produce. Women, said Hancock, “are thought of
as more elaborate in their language, whereas
men are really succinct and to the
point.” Another possible explanation: “There is
something called ‘communication
accommodation,’ where you speak like the other
person in order to facilitate the interaction or feel
close to that person,” explained Hancock. “It’s
possible that speakers had a stereotype that
women have a more elaborate style of speaking,
so they tried to modify their own language to
match that.”

No matter that the stereotype didn’t actually hold

true. “This is analogous to a speaker using a
Southern dialect only when speaking to a known
Southerner, even when that Southerner is not
displaying a Southern dialect,” wrote Hancock
and Rubin.