Variability and Consistency in the Idiosyncratic Selection of Fillers in Japanese Monologues: Gender Differences

This study is a linguistic study on idiosyn-crasy using speaker classification tech-nique as an analytical tool. The goals of this study are to find out 1) to what extent Japanese filler words (e.g. um, you know in English) carry individual idiosyncratic information; 2) if there are any differences in the degree/nature of idiosyncrasy be-tween the sexes; and 3) what contributes to the identified gender differences, if there are any. Based purely on the individ-ual selection of fillers, we report in this study that 1) speaker discrimination per-formance was better in the male (ca. 85% accuracy) than the female (ca. 75 % accu-racy) speakers by approximately 10%, and 2) the poorer performance of the female speakers was due to the larger within– speaker differences in the female speakers than the male speakers. That is, the selec-tion of fillers by female speakers is more variable, speech by speech, than that by male speakers, even under similar condi-tions (e.g. same type of audience and the same degree of formality). We also dis-cuss that the findings of the current study agree with the previously–reported differ-ences between the sexes in language use.