What evidence do you have that some speaking patterns are more common with women? Can you link to some data?
Edit: Lots of opinions here. Still no data.
Edit: Lots of opinions here. Still no data.
Uptalk is more common in women: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/overturning-the-myt...
Vocal fry is more common in women: "An examination of creaky voice occurring in natural conversations among relatively young educated American and Japanese speakers revealed that female speakers of American English residing in California employed creaky voice much more frequently than comparable American male and Japanese female speakers." http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/content/85/3/315.abst...
(Edit: I'd like to find better resources on this if available. These seem to be small studies.)
Mark Liberman has been covering this for years over at Language Log and there appears to be a great deal of ongoing debate within the academic community:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=%22vocal+fr...
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20155 discusses male usage and briefly mentions the study from your second link.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=13020 has some graphs of what exactly this means sound-wise and http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3626 discusses the history.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3626 covers the claims that this is some new trend, many of which are couched in language which implies that kids these days are doing something wrong or degenerate.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=12774 discusses media coverage a couple of years ago claiming that women's careers (or vocal cords) would be damaged by using vocal fry.
This American Life did an entire episode (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/i... – http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17489 has discussion) about the volume and vehemence of the complaints they receive about female cast members' use of vocal fry:
> Listeners have always complained about young women reporting on our show. They used to complain about reporters using the word like and about upspeak, which is when you put a question mark at the end of a sentence and talk like this. But we don't get many emails like that anymore. People who don't like listening to young women on the radio have moved on to vocal fry.
> What's striking in the dozens of emails about vocal fry that we've gotten here at our radio show is how vehement people are. These are some of the angriest emails we ever get. They call these women's voices unbearable, excruciating, annoyingly adolescent, beyond annoying, difficult to pay attention, so severe as to cause discomfort, can't stand the pain, distractingly disgusting, could not get over how annoyed I was, I am so appalled, detracts from the credibility of the journalist, degrades the value of the reportage, it's a choice, very unprofessional.
The part which underscores that there's a strong gender-based component to criticism is that Ira Glass, the male host of This American Life, is basically the king of vocal fry (along with other long-time radio personalities like Carl Kassel or Walter Cronkite) but nobody complains about his usage and on the rare occasions when any mention is made, it's not expressed in the same kind of negative language:
I'm assuming that all of the complainers knew the name of it and of its existence to begin with. I wonder if there's a negative preferential reaction there.
Like many things, this is a taste, and the same taste can seem delicious to one person and disgusting to another. I know someone who can't stand chocolate...
In men we generally don't even notice it. It's just the way men talk. Here are some videos of actors all with loads of vocal fry, but, except when presented as a list of "men with vocal fry," no one would ever think to pick up on it and mention it: http://the-toast.net/2015/07/22/examples-of-male-vocal-fry/
The only study the post links to is paywalled and the link to a conference paper is dead.
Your second link is also paywalled.
[It's not your fault, just the current reality.]
That's why generally in a work you'll see "reproduced with permission" underneath figures and tables taken from other works.
The case for fair use is stronger if the work is criticism of the source material. It's a huge gray area, and some journals pursue claims relentlessly.
Edit: Or, perhaps, they are rate-limited by HN and can only use the triangles?
EDIT: also FWIW, I would love to see good data about potential differences in vocal patterns in males and females, if for no other reason than that I could use it in my D&D campaign.
>These are both more common speaking patterns with women.
It is incorrect to ask for "only observed" data in this instance, but I also was clear to state that it was only an example of data that could be presented.
>parallels a standard trolling technique of asking for evidence and then dismissing any information presented.
If the response is not actual evidence, it should be dismissed. There is no guarantee that a response to a request for evidence is actually valid. That requires investigating the claimed evidence. In this case I investigated and found it severely lacking, as I noted above. Another user has linked to some further analysis of one of the claimed pieces of evidence (the 23-person Southern California study) that shows an apparent basic arithmetic error in the presentation of results. The NTY blog dead links that study and other places that have it require one to pay to see it.
>about one study not being broad enough
Yes, the study was 12 women and 11 men, aged 18-22, living in the same geographic location. There were severe differences in the experimental conditions between the groups being studied (women all interviewed by women; most, but not all, men interviewed by men). Everything I have read also indicates that this study found that both the men and women in the study often exhibited the pattern that was being watched for.
>and still others for being on twitter.
The problem is not about being on Twitter, but that the accounts being studied were neither 1) confirmed to be human, nor 2) confirmed to be the gender the experimenters assumed (and to which they compared their predictions/guesses! [in-built confirmation bias?]).
>that you're not making a good-faith effort to evaluate information fairly, but are instead holding firm to a preconception and requiring extraordinary proof before being willing to reconsider.
I can't evaluate what I can't see and I don't see how I have been unfair to anything that has been presented here. I don't think I am asking for extraordinary proof. I'm only asking for evidence of the particular claim:
>These are both more common speaking patterns with women.
So, something like: randomly sampled recordings from public places with counts of the occurrence of the pattern and the gender of the person who spoke it.
You claimed preconception about the topic. Perceiving trolling is a preconception about your rhetorical technique. Don't overlook that important nuance.
>> [SNIP -- attempts to justify]
I don't care whether you are or aren't justified in rejecting the data (I have no dog in this fight.) I'm simply noting that you seem to give off the impression that you're not genuinely interested, or open to being persuaded. This is more than just whether or not you accept the studies; it's in the phraseology you choose. Just as an example, you found the time to be snarky about downvotes, but not to express gratitude toward any of the people who have tried to provide you with data (even if the data is insufficient.)
> "I don't think I am asking for extraordinary proof."
The line I quoted ("this pattern has only been observed with women") was an unreasonable, extraordinary standard of proof. In a vacuum I would have ignored it. But in combination with the snark and dismissiveness, the sum total does fit a pattern that is common to people trolling on all sorts of topics.
Again: I don't have a dog in this fight. I'm just trying to help you understand what about your behavior might be causing people to perceive you as worthy of downvotes. I'm trying to give you insight as to how, if you are interested in genuine dialog, you can make that clear to others. Because your posts thus far create a very different perception than that.
> I'm simply noting that you seem to give off the impression that you're not genuinely interested, or open to being persuaded.
You're not the first person to conflate me writing and giving attention to something as being "not genuinely interested". I honestly do not understand this perception, particularly when I am discussing details of things brought up deeper into a conversation. Why would I waste my time on such trivialities?
>The line I quoted ("this pattern has only been observed with women") was an unreasonable, extraordinary standard of proof.
You'll note that line is not in this particular thread. It is however related and I agree that it was poor.
>I'm just trying to help you understand what about your behavior might be causing people to perceive you as worthy of downvotes. I'm trying to give you insight as to how, if you are interested in genuine dialog, you can make that clear to others. Because your posts thus far create a very different perception than that.
Thank you for writing out your perceptions, even though you only downvoted one of my posts. I don't think the perceptions you describe as others perhaps having accurately characterize me, though. I am not attempting to create a particular perception; I'm only trying to have an on-topic discussion: an absolute claim was made that seemed to lack observed evidence -- and despite many posts discussing it now, no real evidence has been shown.
There is a classic trolling technique, which I have heard called a "snow job" but probably has other names, wherein someone tries to basically overwhelm a topic of discussion with minutia in order to get people to waste their time while not actually making any progress in the discussion.
Relatedly, a common technique among people who are dogmatic about a position is to build an impenetrable wall (built out of unreasonable standards of proof, and nitpicking criticism) and then spend a lot of time arguing about how their wall hasn't been penetrated. In essence it becomes a way of inflating the ego -- "we argued for hours and the other guy never even put a dent in my position! That's because I'm so smart!"
Again, not saying this is what you're actually doing, just noting that it's easy to get that perception from reading along.
> "I don't think the perceptions you describe as others perhaps having accurately characterize me, though."
Perhaps they don't. But the first comment I made in this subthread has a score of +10 right now (an unusually high score for a meta-comment of this sort, particularly this deeply nested), which indicates that quite a few people share the perception.
> "I am not attempting to create a particular perception; I'm only trying to have an on-topic discussion"
Whenever you speak or write, you create a perception. Whether intentional or unintentional, it affects your ability to have an on-topic discussion. My hope is that you'll be able to take what I've written here and learn how to reshape that perception, in order to more effectively communicate your interest in an on-topic discussion.
One final thought: the comment "no real evidence", likewise, contributes to the perception. What has been shown might be weak evidence, but it's not nothing. In a Bayesian sense, if you started with a neutral perception ("I do not know if there is a significant difference") what has been presented would be suggestive that a difference might exist, but not strong enough to show that a difference definitely exists. The proper response would be "this seems like an area where better data could be gathered" rather than "no real evidence has been shown".
https://civic.mit.edu/blog/natematias/best-practices-for-eth...
Read under "Inferring Gender from Content".
Other examples were a selective study on Twitter, where the experimenters don't even know the true gender, or even humanity, of the user. The author of the section seems to disclaim the entire idea, somewhat (as it probably should be).
I was looking for something that could hold up to the claim that individuals of the same gender do, in fact, have common speech patterns. For example, "this pattern has only been observed with women", and, "this pattern has only been seen with men".