What have I found and could test?
Deborah Tannen-DT
Title-'That's not what I meant!'
first published-1987
240 pages
'how conversational style makes or breaks your relations with others'
Part of the book shows how people use loudness and fast pace replies to show they were listening and understood.
This could be tested to see how people respond when someone says something agreeable and disagreeable to see what they do when replying.
Peter Stockwell 2002
'men's turns last longer '
Test this by having men and women in a conversation together in a situation where there is no occupation factors so the data is reliable.
You could test the first theory by recording the conversation and seeing how loud and quickly they reply to certain people
ReplyDeleteThose are actually quite hard factors to measure and report on and you would have to link it carefully to what was being said and how. I think that looking at turn length/number of turns/airtime and how turns are held or lost is fascinating and you are right - to make it a useful investigation, you would have to have as many comparability factors as possible - same age, class etc so that gender was (as far as you can ever make that possible) the only factor that differed so that you can point to it as the reason for differing results.
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