Gender in everyday speech and language: a corpus-based study

Abstract

This paper presents an exploratory study on the relations between gender and everyday parlance. A “data-mining” approach is used to explore gender-specific characteristics in a large number of spontaneous telephone and face-to-face conversations. Our study focuses on speech rate (speaking rate and articulation rate), disfluencies (filled pauses and repetitions), pronunciation variation (phoneme substitutions, deletions and insertions), and preferences for particular parts of speech. Our study reveals interesting similarities and differences in everyday male and female speech, and proves that data-mining on large spoken language corpora is a promising approach for obtaining information on spontaneous speech phenomena and for generating new hypotheses for research.