A Tentative Study On Conversation Style Of Different Genders In Audio Computer-mediated Communication

With the rapid development of information technology, Internet hasalready profoundly changed people’s communication patterns andlanguage habits. The linguistic phenomena displayed in thecomputer-mediated communication (CMC) have started to arouse theinterest of many scholars, especially sociologists and linguists. Theresearchers who step into this field want to find the similarity andpeculiarity of CMC, comparing to the face-to-face communication. Thisstudy focuses on conversation styles of different genders in audio CMC,based on the Chinese English learners. In comparison with the previousstudies, this paper investigates the issue from a different aspect bytargeting a special group of subjects.To this end,60conversations, including15male conversations,15female conversations as well as30cross-gender conversations between120netizens were collected from YY. Afterwards, the recordings weretranscribed for the need of the study. Then the transcription texts wereanalyzed from five aspects: topic raise&topic control, amount of talk,interruptions&overlaps, tag questions and hedges.After analyzing the data, the author concluded that the conclusionsdrawn from previous studies in face-to-face communication do not apply to the situation in audio CMC in this research. Despite the fact there aresome distinctions between females and males in the usage of theseelements, these differences are subtle and statistically non-significant.Finally, for the different results achieved in this study, the authorproposed several explanations in the five dimensions of the conversationstyle from various perspectives by comparing to the previous researchesand analyzing the present data deeply.As a tentative study on conversation styles of different genders inaudio CMC, this paper also extends the hope of future studies fromdeeper and more comprehensive perspectives.