A Cultural Approach to Male-Female Miscommunication

Abstract

This chapter presents what authors believe to be a useful new framework for examining differences in the speaking patterns of American men and women. Authors&s; major argument is that the general approach recently developed for the study of difficulties in cross-ethnic communication can be applied to cross-sex communication as well. The authors prefer to think of the difficulties in both cross-sex and cross-ethnic communication as two examples of the same larger phenomenon: cultural difference and miscommunication. Contrasting contributions to cross-sex conversations have been observed and described for men. The authors prove the intellectual value of the framework by demonstrating its ability to do two things: to serve as a model both of and for sociolinguistic research. Differences in the social interaction patterns of boys and girls appear to be widely known but rarely utilized in examinations of sociolinguistic acquisition or in explanations of observed gender differences in patterns of adult speech.