Gender Differences In Synchronous Computer Mediated Communication In Chinese

With the development of Internet and its integration with daily life, computer-mediated communication has become an important form of interpersonal communication. Men and women demonstrate different language characteristics in cross-gender conversations in talks. This research is to study the gender differences in Chinese in chatting via synchronous messengers. Twenty cross-gender conversation records were received by the courtesy of 20 QQ users. These records were analyzed from six variables in Chinese: amount of speech, minimal responses, laugh, sentence final particles, emoticons, and net-work expressions. The major findings are drawn in the following: On average, gender differences exist in the amount of speech, turns, and mean length of a turn (MLT), although the differences are not very significant; women were found to use more minimal responses, laugh and emoticons than men; while men were found to use more sentence final particles and network expressions than women. By observing the Chinese corpus collected from the synchronous communication and analyzing the data obtained from the surveys, the result shows that gender differences in Chinese language do not disappear because of virtual context of the network media.