Gender schematicity, identity salience, and -linked language use
4
exists for the claim that men’s and women’s gender identity can affect their respective language use.
Men and women linguistically behave in meaningfully different ways (Mulac, 1998). Men
use certain linguistic features, such as directives (e.g., “Read this book”), more than women, who use
other language features, such as references to emotion (e.g., “I am happy”), more than men. This
differential language use has been demonstrated in public speeches (Mulac & Lundell, 1982), written
discourse (Mulac & Lundell, 1994), impromptu essays (Mulac, Studley, & Blau, 1990), same-sex
and mixed-sex dyads (Mulac, Wiemann, Widenmann, & Gibson, 1988), and other contexts (e.g.,
Mulac & Lundell, 1980, 1986; Mulac et al., 2001b). Further, while the majority of the studies have
used university students’ language, many have used the language of other age groups, such as fourth-
and fifth-grade students (Mulac et al., 1990), and individuals in their 50s and 60s (Mulac & Lundell,
1994). In fact, knowing one’s language use alone allows for high accuracy (e.g., 97% accuracy) in
the statistical prediction of the communicator’s sex (Mulac, 1998).
Although linguistic variation between men and women is independently notable (i.e.,
gender-linked language use), investigating these differences is supplemented by examining the
evaluative effects of such linguistic variation (i.e., gender-linked language effect). The gender-linked
language effect is the consistent finding that communicators across a variety of contexts who use
language empirically found to be more prototypically female are judged by naïve raters to be
aesthetically pleasing and high on socio-intellectual status, whereas communicators across a variety
of contexts who use language typical of men are judged to be dynamic (Mulac, 1998). The same
language is not judged differently depending on the sex of the speaker, which is known to the rater;
rather, the specific language features determine the extent to which a communicator is judged
dynamic, aesthetically pleasing, and socio-intellectual (e.g., Mulac & Bradac, 1995; Mulac &
Lundell, 1986). Even when the accuracy of individuals in determining speaker sex is no better than
chance, men’s language is judged to be more dynamic by readers of their transcripts than women’s
language. Women’s language, on the other hand, is determined to be higher on socio-intellectual
Convention