Benjamin Okelberry

Barton
Communication Theory
16 February 2018
Annotated Bibliography
Berryman, C. L., & Wilcox, J. R. (1980). Attitudes toward male and female speech: experiments

on the effects of sex-typical language. Western journal of speech communication: WJSC,

44(1), 50-59.

The question asked in this article was, are attitudes toward a speaker biased on specific

features in the message or on stereotypes of the male and female genders? One hundred and eight

female undergraduate students were given booklets containing a message that was given by a

male or female speaker. Without knowing the gender of the speaker, the participants read and

then judged whether the message came from a male or female. Sixty-six present of participants

that were given the male message identified the gender correctly, and seventy-eight present that

were given the female identified the gender correctly. The research also suggested that some of

the male and female stereotypes about speech are indeed true. This research supports the two-

culture given by Malts and Broker by indicating that males and females have unique speech

techniques.

Brotherton, P. L., & Penman, R. A. (1977). A comparison of some characteristics of male and

female speech. journal of social psychology, 103(1), 161.

The research for this article was to see if long held beliefs about specific speech patterns

used by the different genders are true. The beliefs that they were testing were women speak

more, speak faster, leave more sentences unfinished, and operate at a simpler conceptual level
than men. To test the beliefs 15 male and 19 female students at a university participated in an

interview that was taped recorded. The recordings were then analyzed to see if the beliefs held

true for these interviews. The results showed that the beliefs tested were not present in the speak

of the participants. I do question the credibility of this article for several reasons. Firstly, the

article is older in date. Second, there were only 35 participants used to test the beliefs. And third,

I have never heard of the belief that women operate at a simpler conceptual level. But this article

does point to the fact that the idea of gender culture as it relates to speaking patterns is worth

researching.

Canary, D. J., & Hause, K. S. (1993). Is there any reason to research sex differences in

communication?. Communication quarterly, 41(2), 129-144.

This article examines why research into the reasons studying gender and communication

is a difficult business. Some meta-analyses were done on over 1,200 other studies and the results

were presented. There is a lot of information in this article concerning results of these studies.

Some of the most interesting to me were that women did seem to ask more question than men,

and that it is hard to do research on gender in communication because it can be hard to tell what

factors come from a gender’s culture or the difference in biology. I would like to reread this

article and spend more time with it because there is so much in there elated to the two-culture

theory I am studying.

Hannah, A., & Murachver, T. (2007). Gender preferential responses to speech. Journal of

language & social psychology, 26(3), 274-290. doi:10.1177/0261927X06303457

This researchers for this article wanted to know how much influence a person’s speech

patterns are affected by their gender verses how much it is influenced by the speech patterns of
the conversation partner that the persons speaking with. Forty-eight participants were part of two

different conversations with a person of the opposite sex. Participants were either the facilitator

or not the facilitator in these conversations. The results showed that most started out mimicking

the speech patterns of the other person at first, but as time went on the participants reverted back

to their gender specific speech patterns. This helps support the theory I am studying because it

helps weed out one of the alternative suggestions of why there seems to be a difference in speech

between genders.

Kim, M., & Bresnahan, M. (1996). cognitive basis of gender communication: A cross-cultural

investigation of perceived constraints in requesting. Communication quarterly, 44(1), 53-

69.

This article had two research questions which were 1) is there a difference in perceived

importance in communication constraints between genders, and 2) are the findings the same

across different cultures around the world? 972 undergraduate students from Korea, Japan,

Hawaii, and the United States of America participated in this study. Each was given six different

scenarios and were asked how they would rate the importance of a constraint. The results showed

that there was not a significant difference between the genders or the cultures. Although this

article was interesting it did not test the kind of differences that the two-culture theory suggests.

This was a mistake on my part for choosing this article, but I did learn that there might be a

similarity in speech patters between culture around the world when it comes to gender.