[Corpora-List] FW: Gender differences in language

[Yannick Versley]

> EVANSTON, Ill. --- Although researchers have long agreed that girls have
> superior language abilities than boys, until now no one has clearly
> provided a biological basis that may account for their differences.

I'm trying pretty hard not to be predjudiced about this - but this, like some 
other findings that fail to mention that within-sex-differences are far 
greater than differences between sexes, seems to fall exactly into the trope 
of
	1. Consider the hypothesis that <Stereotypical-Observation-X-About-People>.
	2. Brain Researcher Y used fMRI to show that (some experimental proxy for) X
		is (somewhat) true. Now we know!
	3a. Optional bonus #1: Now we know why! It happens (somewhere) in the brain!
	3b: Optional bonus #2: This shows that X is hard-wired and biological, not
		all soft and socially constructed.
that the people over at LanguageLog like to pound on...
(see http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005448.html and other 
posts)

I'm all for using neuroimaging and statistical methods to find and model 
differences in how people process information. But I'm not sure if focusing 
on the rather small part of the variation that can be explained using gender 
(or other heavily stereotype-prone attributes, such as race, sexuality, or 
religion, for that matter) and shoving the rest under the rug is really 
helping the discovery of new things.
> If that pattern extends to language processing that occurs in the
> classroom, it could inform teaching and testing methods.
>
>  Given boys' sensory approach, boys might be more effectively evaluated on
> knowledge gained from lectures via oral tests and on knowledge gained by
> reading via written tests. For girls, whose language processing appears
> more abstract in approach, these different testing methods would appear
> unnecessary.
Given that it is a known fact that different people do differently well at 
processing visual or auditory information, and that teaching *should* take 
this into account (even though knowledge 'gained via lectures' is almost 
always deepened by either literature study or discussions with peers, 
something that should level the difference somewhat), I'm not sure if this 
corollary should get me excited.

Maybe the Uni's PR department just failed to report the sensible undertones in 
their press release. But in the increasingly predominant competition for 
funding (and fMRI devices, eye trackers, and - somewhat closer to 
computational and corpus linguistics - compute clusters are expensive, 
there's no way around it), we should be careful that the quest for the truth 
is not displaced by a quest for things-that-may-look-exciting-
to-people-with-short-attention-spans.
(Just my 2c and maybe deliberately polemic in places).

Cheers,
Yannick
-- 
Yannick Versley
Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft, Abt. Computerlinguistik
Wilhelmstr. 19, 72074 Tübingen
Tel.: +49 (7071) 29 77352

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