Language Log
Mark Liberman
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3672#more-3672You've probably noticed that how people talk depends on who they're talking with. And for 40 years or so, linguists and psychologists and sociologists have referred to this process as "speech accommodation" or "communication accommodation" — or, for short, just plain "accommodation". This morning's Breakfast Experiment™ explores a version of the speech accommodation effect as applied to groups rather than individuals — some ways that men and women talk differently in same-sex vs. mixed-sex conversations.
I got the idea of doing this a couple of days ago, as I was indexing some conversational transcripts in order to find material for an experiment on a completely different topic. The transcripts in question come from a large collection of telephone conversations known as the "Fisher English" corpus, collected at the LDC in 2003 and published in 2004 and 2005. These two publications together comprise 11,699 two-person conversations, involving a diverse collection of speakers. While the sample is not demographically balanced in a strict sense, there is a good representation of speakers from all over the United States, across a wide range of ages, educational levels, occupations, and so forth.
