Indicates that biological terminology, such as mother cell'' and labels of sex factors in bacteria, reflect discrimination against females by reinforcing perpetuation of stereotyped gender roles. (AL)

Presents details of research on intonation in New Zealand English that demonstrate the existence of measurable and reliable speaker-sex differences in pitch measures. Two main factors are considered: the use of a perceptual scale for pitch and the nature of the tasks used to collect the speech data. (Author/VWL)

Undergraduate males, undergraduate females, and graduate student nurses (female) were asked to list all the slang expressions they knew for 17 sex-related stimulus words. Males listed a significantly larger total number of slang expressions than either female group. (Author)

A total of 16 mothers and 16 fathers were recorded in dyadic sessions with their children (eight five year olds, eight two year olds; half boys, half girls) and with an adult. Noise-free questions and declaratives were analyzed for pitch and frequency range. Results suggest that both fundamental frequency and range are significantly influenced by…

A study investigated the use of three pragmatic expressions ("you know, you see, I mean") by female and male British English speakers to (1) establish actual differences in usage over a number of functions of the three expressions, and (2) discover any correlation of usage with same-sex vs. mixed-sex interaction. (Author/MSE)

This study compared the relative use by four male and four female youth with mental retardation of linguistic (grammatical) devices identified as characteristic of typical female speech (qualifying markers, question styles, and politeness terms). Females produced significantly more qualifying markers than did males, although neither question style…

The first study indicates that (1) both messages and message sources differed significantly as a function of the sophistication of the strategies employed by the message source and (2) female sources were more positively evaluated than male sources. The second study reveals that evaluations of comforting messages varied as a direct, linear…

Examined gender differences in emotional language in children's picture books, using 178 books read to or by preschool children. Males had higher representations on titles, pictures, and central roles, but males and females were associated with equal amounts of emotional language and similar types of emotional words. (SLD)

Preschoolers were taped while individually interacting with each of their parents. Tapes were transcribed and the language forms used by children and parents were counted. These forms included constructions involving the contraction "let's"; colloquial lexical items such as "whatchamacallit"; tag questions such as "You're…

Reviews some problems which have risen from the neglect of actual language behavior data in favor of data comprised solely of intuitions as to sentences' grammaticality. Discusses a study of syntactic variation across sex in Japanese as an example of research using socially situated real speech. (EKN)

Comparison of the 1970 and 1984 editions of a Spanish dictionary regarding the accommodation of female counterparts of traditionally male occupations found such adjustments as use of the feminine article "la" and the suffixes "-a" and "-nta." Other nouns proved to be particularly resistant to such accommodation. (CB)

Two studies investigated gender influences on the communication patterns of individuals with mental retardation. Gender-linked patterns appeared to exist among speakers with the highest Mean Length Utterances (MLU), despite the overarching relationship of MLU and person reference. (CR)

Language transcripts were obtained from eight male and eight female participants with mental retardation, interacting separately with one male and one female adult partner. Like typical females, female participants using speech discussed people more often than males. Females using nonspeech modes, in contrast, showed a severe reduction in…

Presents data on patterns of language use by Italians living in Australia, focusing on the maintenance of Italian and Dialect under the impact of widespread shift to English. Data from self-report surveys suggest differences by gender, age, and region of origin and note that the position of Italian, though more limited, is somewhat more solid than…