Conversational style often overrides what is said, affecting who gets heard and what gets done. Women's linguistic styles often make them seem less competent and self-assured than they are. Better understanding of speech styles will make managers better listeners and communicators. (SK)

Reports experiments in which college students provided color names for a series of color stimuli, matched color names with the same stimuli, and described colors represented by a series of elaborate color terms. Sex-related differences were found in the matching task. Women used more elaborate descriptions than men. (Author/AMH)

Fundamental vocal frequency characteristics were measured for 50 male and 50 female Black six-year-olds. No significant differences in mean or range values were found as a function of speaker sex. Nonsignificant relationships were found between variables of speaker height/weight and fundamental frequency measures, for both sexes and for groups…

Male and females listeners rated 21 young female voices on seven scales representing unique vocal features. Voices were described as "passive", or traditionally female, and "active," characterized as "lively,""colorful," and "sexy." Females found active characteristics more salient; males preferred the passive characteristics. Implications for…

Indicates that communicator gender and cultural ancestry interacted to influence the intensity of language chosen. Reveals that men of Chinese and Japanese ancestry produced significantly more intense messages than did their female counterparts, while no significant differences were apparent between the messages produced by Caucasian men and…

Describes a range of forms and functions expressed by "you know," as well as its use by women and men in a corpus of spontaneous speech. Interesting contrasts were found in the most frequent functions expressed by "you know" in female and male usage. (Author/SED)

Discusses a quantitative study of the use of Australian Questioning Intonation (AQI) in Sydney, which reveals that it has the social distribution characteristic of a language change in progress. The social motivations of AQI are examined in terms of local identity and the entry of new ethnic groups into the community. (Author/SED)

The recorded conversations of 40 preschool children in small groups were analyzed for interruptions, overlaps, lapses, and gaps. Significant differences were found between heterogeneous and homogeneous groups for interruptions, with boys interrupting girls at a two to one ratio. (Author/RL)

Examines differences among speech behavior-social evaluation relationships as a function of whether the evaluator's perspective was that of a participant or an observer and, if the latter, whether the presentational medium involved an audiovisual, audio-only, or transcriptual recording. (RAE)

Examines how masculine and feminine speech patterns affect the acceptance by superiors of decisions made by male and female subordinates. Indicates that proposals of subordinates with masculine speech patterns are more likely to be accepted by male listeners, whereas female listeners are not influenced by the speech patterns. (SR)

A study investigated the realization of voicing contrasts ("breathiness") in plosive consonants produced by young French adults, particularly as they differ in males and females. Data came from acoustic analysis of recordings of nine informants reading lists of monosyllabic words with initial plosive consonants in isolation and in the content,…

Many myths associated with masculine and feminine talk have had to be discarded as more research has been undertaken. Sex differences in areas such as talkativeness, voice pitch, and listening ability do not really exist. But stereotypes still keep many females from speaking up in mixed-sex classes. (SJL)

Examined the speech patterns of three- to eight-year-old children. Results showed that the children most often used "ah" phenomena and unfilled pauses as do adults. "Ah" phenomena showed a significant increase with age, especially between five and six among the females. (SRT)

Compares the relative effects of speech rate in Korea and the United States for perceptions of the speaker's credibility. Using a 3-way factorial design, data for 120 university students from each country indicate that rapid delivery can enhance one's credibility in the United States and among female Korean speakers. (SLD)

This study assesses whether third graders verbalize gender differences in dominance in mixed- and same-sex interactions, using data from tape-recordings of 43 pairs of white children (14 female and 12 male same-sex dyads and 17 different-sex dyads) playing checkers in same- or mixed-sex conditions. Children develop gender-differentiated speech…