Do boys and girls write the same? Analysis of n-grams of morphological categories ( ¿Niños y niñas escriben igual? Análisis de n-gramas de categorías morfológicas )

Abstract

Spanish

The objective of this study is to characterize writing samples in Catalan written by boys and girls in primary school (from seven to 12 years old) using syntactic patterns. The corpus contains 169 writings divided by sex (76 boys and 93 girls) with an average of 200 words and a total length of 33,763 words. From this corpus, we calculated the 40 n-grams of the most frequent morphological categories (bigrams, trigrams). The data were statistically analysed using ANOVA and Linear Discriminant Analysis, and the accuracy in predicting the writer’s gender in a cross-validation experiment was 60.4% using both bigrams and trigrams. When the children’s age was taken into account, the percentage of accuracy was higher than 70% in both the original classification and the cross-validation. The identification of the most discriminating bigrams and trigrams allowed us to determine that girls show a greater expressive capacity and superior syntactic maturity, and greater lexical and syntactic richness.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Asperholm

Högman

Rafi

Herlitz

(2019). What did you do yesterday? A meta-analysis of sex differences in episodic memory. Psychological Bulletin, 145(8), 785–821. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000197

Bamman

Eisenstein

Schnoebelen

. (2014). Gender identity and lexical variation in social media. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18(2), 135–160.

Bel

Queralt

Spassova

M. S.

Turell

M. T.

(2012). The use of sequences of linguistic categories in forensic written text comparison revisited. In Tombilin

MacLeod

Sousa-Silva

Coulthard

. (Eds.), Proceedings of the International Association of Forensic Linguists’ Tenth Biennal Conference (pp. 192–209). Center of forensic linguistics.

Berglund

Eriksson

Westerlund

. (2005). Communicative skills in relation to gender, birth order, childcare and socioeconomic status in 18-month-old children. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 46(6), 485–491. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9450.2005.00480.x

Black

P. J.

Wollis

Woodworth

Hancock

J. T

. (2015). A linguistic analysis of grooming strategies of online child sex offenders: Implications for our understanding of predatory sexual behavior in an increasingly computer-mediated world. Child Abuse & Neglect, 44, 140–149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2014.12.004

Bornstein

M. H.

Cote

L. R

. (2005). Expressive vocabulary in language learners from two ecological settings in three language communities. Infancy, 7(3), 299–316. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327078in0703_5

Brunner

Gogol

K. M.

Sonnleitner

Keller

Krauss

Preckel

. (2013). Gender differences in the mean level, variability, and profile shape of student achievement: Results from 41 countries. Intelligence, 41(5), 378–395. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2013.05.009

Cameron

. (2008). The myth of mars and venus: Do men and women really speak different languages? Oxford University Press.

Chatterji

. (2006). Reading achievement gaps, correlates, and moderators of early reading achievement: Evidence from the early childhood longitudinal study (ECLS) kindergarten to first grade sample. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98(3), 489–507. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.98.3.489

10.

Cheng

Chandramouli

Subbalakshmi

K. P

. (2011). Author gender identification from text. Digital Investigation, 8(1), 78–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diin.2011.04.002

11.

Chiang

Grant

. (2019). Deceptive identity performance: Offender moves and multiple identities in online child abuse conversations. Applied Linguistics, 40(4), 675–698. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amy007

12.

Cicres

Queralt

. (2019). An n-gram based approach to the automatic classification of schoolchildren’s writing. Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 16(16), 53–80. https://doi.org/10.35869/vial.v0i16.93

13.

Consell Superior d’Avaluació del Sistema Educatiu . (2018). L’avaluació de sisè d’educació primària. Quaderns d’avaluació, 41. http://csda.gencat.cat/ca/arees-actuacio/publicacions/quaderns-avaluacio/quaderns-avaluacio-41/

14.

Consell Superior d’Avaluació del Sistema Educatiu . (2019). L’avaluació de quart d’ESO. Quaderns d’avaluació, 43. http://csda.gencat.cat/ca/arees-actuacio/publicacions/quaderns-avaluacio/quaderns-avaluacio-43/

15.

Diederich

Kindermann

Leopold

Paass

. (2000). Authorship attribution with support vector machines. Applied Intelligence, 19(1–2), 109–123. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023824908771

16.

Disenhaus

. (2015). Boys, writing, and the literacy gender gap: What we know, what we think we know. Graduate College Dissertations and Theses, 330. University of Vermont. https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/graddis/330

17.

Etchell

Adhikari

Weinberg

L. S.

Leen Choo

Garnett

E. O.

Ming Chow

Chang

. (2018). A systematic literature review of sex differences in childhood language and brain development. Neuropsychologia, 114, 19–31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.04.011

18.

Ewert

. (2012). Fewer diplomas for men: The influence of college experiences on the gender gap in college graduation. The Journal of Higher Education, 83(6), 824–850. https://doi.org/10.1353/jhe.2012.0042

19.

Galsworthy

M. J.

Dionne

Dale

P. S.

Plomin

. (2000). Sex differences in early verbal and non-verbal cognitive development. Developmental Science, 3(2), 206–215. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-7687.00114

20.

Grant

. (2007). Quantifying evidence in forensic authorship analysis. The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, 14(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.v14i1.1

21.

Grant

Macleod

. (2016). Assuming identities online: Experimental linguistics applied to the policing of online paedophile activity. Applied Linguistics, 37(1), 50–70. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amv079

22.

Halpern

D. F

. (2012). Sex differences in cognitive abilities (4). Erlbaum.

23.

Halpern

D. F.

LaMay

. (2000). The smarter sex: A critical review of sex differences in intelligence. Educational Psychology Review, 12(2), 229–246. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009027516424

24.

Halpern

Wai

. (2020). Sex differences in intelligence. In Sternberg

(Ed.), The cambridge handbook of intelligence (pp. 317–345). Cambridge University Press.

25.

Hansen

. (2002). Writing sux!” Boys and writing: What’s the problem? SET Research Information for Teachers, 1(1), 38–43. https://doi.org/10.18296/set.0740

26.

Hawthorne

. (2008). Students’ beliefs about barriers to engagement with writing in secondary school English: A focus group study. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 31(1), 30–42.

27.

Holmes

D. I

. (1994). Authorship attribution. Computers and the Humanities, 28(2), 87–106. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01830689

28.

Huttenlocher

Haight

Bryk

Seltzer

Lyons

. (1991). Early vocabulary growth: Relation to language input and gender. Developmental Psychology, 27(2), 236–248. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.27.2.236

29.

Kulmizev

Blankers

Bjerva

Nissim

van Noord

Plank

Wieling

(2017). The power of character n-grams in native language identification. In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (pp. 382–389). Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).

30.

Kuvač-Kraljević

Blaži

Schults

Tulviste

Stolt

. (2021). Influence of internal and external factors on early language skills: A cross-linguistic study. Infant Behavior and Development, 63, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101552

31.

Logan

Johnston

R. S

. (2009). Gender differences in reading ability and attitudes: Examining where these differences lie. Journal of Research in Reading, 32(2), 199–214. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9817.2008.01389.x

32.

Logan

Johnston

. (2010). Investigating gender differences in reading. Educational Review, 62(2), 175–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911003637006

33.

Maynard

Lowe

. (1999). Boys and writing in the primary school. Education 3-13: International Journal of Primary, Elementary and Early Years Education, 27(2), 4–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004279985200131

34.

McCardle

M. I

. (2018). Examining the complexity of police officers’ Language during investigative interviews with adults and youth. Journal of European Psychology Students, 9(1), 40–47. https://doi.org/10.5334/jeps.444

35.

McGeown

S. P.

Johnston

R. S.

Walker

Howatson

Stockburn

Dufton

. (2015). The relationship between young children’s enjoyment of learning to read, reading attitudes, confidence and attainment. Educational Research, 57(4), 389–402. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131881.2015.1091234

36.

McKenna

M. C.

Kear

D. J.

Ellsworth

R. A

. (1995). Children’s attitudes toward reading: A national survey. Reading Research Quarterly, 30(4), 934–956. https://doi.org/10.2307/748205

37.

Morel

Torner

Vivaldi

De Yzaguirre

Cabré

M. T

. (1998). El corpus de l’IULA: Etiquetaris. Papers de l’IULA, sèrie informes, 18. IULA, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

38.

Muehlenhard

C. L.

Peterson

Z. D

. (2011). Distinguishing between sex and gender: History, current conceptualizations, and implications. Sex Roles, 64(11–12), 791–803. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-011-9932-5

39.

Nini

. (2019). Corpus analysis in forensic linguistics. In Chapelle

C. A.

(Ed.), The concise encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 313–320). Wiley Blackwell.

40.

Queralt

Giménez

. (2019). Podem elaborar perfils sociolingüístics forenses a partir de corpus discursius d’àmbit escolar? Apunts de sociolingüística i política lingüística, 5, 1–5. https://www.ub.edu/cusc/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Apunts-CUSC-Num-5-Gener-2019-Linguistica-forense.pdf

41.

Reilly

. (2012). Gender, culture, and sex-typed cognitive abilities. PLoS ONE, 7(7), e39904. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0039904

42.

Reilly

Neumann

D. L.

Andrews

. (2019). Gender differences in reading and writing achievement: Evidence from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). American Psychologist, 74(4), 445–458. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000356

43.

Schultheiss

O. C.

Köllner

M. G.

Busch

Hofer

. (2021). Evidence for a robust, estradiol-associated sex difference in narrative-writing fluency. Neuropsychology, 35(3), 323–333. https://doi.org/10.1037/neu0000706

44.

Shaqiri

Roinishvili

Grzeczkowski

Chkonia

Pilz

Mohr

Brand

Kunchulia

Herzog

M. H

. (2018). Sex-related differences in vision are heterogeneous. Scientific Reports, 8(1), 7521. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-25298-8

45.

Sotomayor

Lucchini

Bedwell

Biedma

Hernández

Molina

. (2013). Producción escrita en la Educación Básica: Análisis de narraciones de alumnos de escuelas municipales de Chile. ONOMÁZEIN, 27, 53–77. https://doi.org/10.7764/onomazein.27.04

46.

Spassova

M. S.

Turell

M. T

. (2007). The use of morpho-syntactically annotated tag sequences as forensic markers of authorship attribution. In Turell

M. T.

Spassova

M. S.

Cicres

(Eds.), Proceedings of the Second European IAFL Conference on Forensic Linguistics/Language and the Law (pp. 229–237). Publicacions de l’IULA.

47.

Stoet

. (2015). British male students continue to fall behind in secondary education. New Male Studies: an International Journal, 4(3), 23–49. https://eprints.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/id/eprint/4065/

48.

Stolarova

Brielmann

A. A.

Wolf

Rinker

Burke

Baayen

. (2016). Early vocabulary in relation to gender, bilingualism, type, and duration of childcare. Advances in Cognitive Psychology, 12(3), 130–144. https://doi.org/10.5709/acp-0192-6

49.

Turell

M. T

. (2010). The use of textual, grammatical and sociolinguistic evidence in forensic text comparison. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, 17(2), 211–250. https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.v17i2.211

50.

Voyer

Saint Aubin

Altman

Gallant

. (2021). Sex differences in verbal working memory: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 147(4), 352–398. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000320

51.

Wallentin

. (2009). Putative sex differences in verbal abilities and language cortex: A critical review. Brain and Language, 108(3), 175–183. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2008.07.001

52.

Warrington

Younger

McLellan

. (2003). Under-achieving boys’ in english primary schools? Curriculum Journal, 14(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585170302830

53.

Westerlund

Lagerberg

. (2008). Expressive vocabulary in 18-month-old children in relation to demographic factors, mother and child characteristics, communication style and shared reading. Child: Care, Health and Development, 34(2), 257–266. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2214.2007.00801.x

54.

Zambrana

I. M.

Ystrom

Pons

. (2012). Impact of gender, maternal education, and birth order on the development of language comprehension: A longitudinal study from 18 to 36 months of age. Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, 33(2), 146–155. https://doi.org/10.1097/DBP.0b013e31823d4f83