You often can’t shut men up in public settings, but it’s women who push the limits of communications when it comes to texting, according to a new Indiana University study.
Now this study is looking is a pretty specific application — an interactive music TV channel called Allmusic in Italy — but the researchers plan to expand their work to examine other settings.
What they found this time around, as discussed in an article they’ve written for the journal Written Communication, is that women are much more expressive than men when they text. Women are much more likely to max out character counts, wield abbreviations wildly and are free with their emoticons, the study found through an analysis of more than 1,100 text messages.
“The messages are very flirtatious and have nothing to do with the television show,” said Susan Herring, a professor in the IU School of Library and Information Science, in a statement. “In the linguistic marketplace there have always been different values associated with standard and non-standard language, and here we have found results that are paradoxical, that are the opposite of the recognized socio-linguistic gender patterns.”
Women traditionally have used standard language more than men when they are looking to climb socially, Herring says.
