ABSTRACT

The present study analyzes the phenomenon of linguistic accommodation, i.e. the adaptation of one’s language use to that of one’s conversation partner. In a large corpus of private social media messages, we compare Flemish teenagers’ writing in two conversational settings: same-gender (including only boys or only girls) and mixed-gender conversations (including at least one girl and one boy). We examine whether boys adopt a more ‘female’ and girls a more ‘male’ writing style in mixed-gender talks, i.e. whether teenagers converge towards their conversation partner with respect to gendered writing. The analyses focus on two sets of prototypical markers of informal online writing, for which a clear gender divide has been attested in previous research: expressive typographic markers (e.g., emoticons), which can be considered more ‘female’ features, and ‘oral’, speech-like markers (e.g., regional language features), which are generally more popular among boys. Using generalized linear-mixed models, we examine the frequency of these features in boys’ and girls’ writing in same- versus mixed-gender conversations.

Patterns of convergence emerge from the data: they reveal that girls and boys adopt a more similar style in mixed-gender talks. Strikingly, the convergence is asymmetrical and only significant for a particular group of online language features.

摘要

本研究分析了语言适应现象，即一个人的语言使用适应一个人的谈话伙伴。在大量私人社交媒体消息中，我们比较了佛兰德青少年在两种对话环境中的写作：同性别（仅包括男孩或仅女孩）和混合性别对话（至少包括一个女孩和一个男孩）。我们研究了在混合性别谈话中男孩是否采用更“女性”的写作风格，而女孩是否采用更“男性”的写作风格，即青少年是否在性别写作方面趋向于他们的谈话伙伴。分析集中在非正式在线写作的两组原型标记上，在先前的研究中已经证明了明显的性别差异：表达性排版标记（例如，表情符号），可以被认为是更多的“女性”特征，和“口头”，类似语音的标记（例如，区域语言特征），通常在男孩中更受欢迎。使用广义线性混合模型，我们检查了这些特征在男孩和女孩在同性别和混合性别对话中写作的频率。

数据中出现了趋同模式：它们表明女孩和男孩在混合性别谈话中采用更相似的风格。引人注目的是，收敛是不对称的，并且只对特定的在线语言特征组有意义。