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Speaker sex and perceived apportionment of talk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Anne Cutler  and
Donia R. Scott
Anne Cutler*
Affiliation:
MRC Applied Psychology Unit
Donia R. Scott
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
*
Anne Cutler, MRC Applied Psychology Unit, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge CB2 2EF, England
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Abstract

It is a widely held belief that women talk more than men; but experimental evidence has suggested that this belief is mistaken. The present study investigated whether listener bias contributes to this mistake. Dialogues were recorded in mixed-sex and single-sex versions, and male and female listeners judged the proportions of talk contributed to the dialogues by each participant. Female contributions to mixed-sex dialogues were rated as greater than male contributions by both male and female listeners. Female contributions were more likely to be overestimated when they were speaking a dialogue part perceived as probably female than when they were speaking a dialogue part perceived as probably male. It is suggested that the misestimates are due to a complex of factors that may involve both perceptual effects such as misjudgment of rates of speech and sociological effects such as attitudes to social roles and perception of power relations.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , September 1990 , pp. 253 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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