A pilot study on gender differences in conversational speech on lexical in richness measures

Recent research on gender differences in language has mostly addressed cognitive differences. These differences have been observed on different cognitive verbal and non–verbal tasks and conclusions on the variability in language production and comprehension have been drawn from their results. In this paper, a different approach is presented. This pilot study examines lexical richness measures in conversational speech across a total of thirty subjects. All subjects were recorded and transcribed in a conversational setting. Their transcribed speech was analysed using a set of lexical richness measures based on word–frequencies. On the basis of these measurements, statistical discriminant analysis is able to classify the two groups with 90 per cent (74 per cent with leave–one–out cross–validation) correct prediction rate at a statistically significant level (P = 0. 03). The results are discussed in detail, including correlation and principal components analysis. The paper concludes that there are interesting differences across the two groups on the measures studied and further research in this area is needed.