Question-Asking in Conversational Tasks : A Gender Comparison

This corpus analysis used unexplored gender disparities in a previously collected speech corpus, the Montclair Map Task Corpus (MMTC) to examine stylistic patterns in utterance goals and question-asking. The MMTC utilized a collaborative map task to explore effective communication, gender differences in communication, and patterns in conversational style. The current study built upon those goals by engaging in a more in-depth analysis of the MMTC conversations. To accomplish this, the previously transcribed conversations were coded to determine turn goals. Turns that were observed as questions were further coded to determine question objectives. Based on prior research on affiliative and assertive speech, it was hypothesized that males would utilize challenge questions more than females and that females would utilize more information seeking and clarification questions. Overall, proportions of turns and questions did not vary based on pair sex or talker sex. Relationships between performance question type suggested no meaningful patterns based on pair or talker sex, however some trends were found in clarification questions, where same-sex male pairs and male talkers overall showed negative relationships with performance, while females showed positive relationships with performance