Paper short abstract:

This study explores whether there are gender differences in storytelling among native Japanese speakers from a sociolinguistic perspective. Differences in the patterns of narratives between men and women have been examined using the data on 50 native speakers of Japanese from “I-JAS”.

Paper long abstract:

This study explores whether there are gender differences in storytelling among native Japanese speakers from a sociolinguistic perspective. According to Tannen (1992), men tend to speak more frequently and for longer periods of time than women who are generally perceived as more talkative. Men and women also seem to have different speaking styles, which Tannen (1990) has referred to as “report talk” versus “rapport talk”; men are more likely to engage in information-oriented “report talk”, while women, who value more emotional connections, tend to engage in “rapport talk”. In fact, as Makino (1996) has demonstrated, such gender differences appear not only in the spoken language but also in the written language. In his “Cinderella experiment”, Makino (1996) gave participants an example of a Cinderella story written by a man. Participants were then asked to judge whether the writer was a man or a woman. As a result, 80% of the participants correctly answered "man". This correct answer rate was not by chance. As Makino (1996: 127) has concluded, "they guessed the writer's gender based on some clue". The question then arises as to whether gender differences can also be found in storytelling. This research uses data on 50 native speakers of Japanese from the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics' “International Corpus of Japanese as a Second Languages: I-JAS”. The result shows that 1) there was no gender difference in the length of narratives, 2) more than 70% of the fillers that appeared in the narratives were "eh," which was especially common among men, 3) a prologue at the beginning of narratives and a listener-oriented tendency in speech were only observed in women, and 4) men mostly talked about what they could actually see, whereas women were more likely to talk about sympathetic content.

[References]

Makino, S. (1996) Uchi to soto no gengobunkagaku. Tokyo: Alc.

Tannen, D. (1990) You just don’t understand. New York: Ballantine.

Tannen, D. (1992) Wakariaenai wake. Tokyo: Kodansha.