Women Talk More than Men is a volume aimed at the undergraduate textbook market. Each chapter takes a ‘myth’ about language and deconstructs it, with
careful and critical attention to research. This means that each chapter
touches on a different theme in linguistics, including first language
acquisition, second language acquisition, language and gender, sign
language, sociolinguistic perception, and animal communication.
My initial skepticism about this volume was my own fault - before reading this I’d gone back and read The Language of Food, and In The Land of Invented Languages, two amazing books that are about people and their use of language, with some information about linguistics on the side. Women Talk More than Men, while not as lively and driven by anecdote, is a remarkably personable and compelling entry in the textbook genre.
As Gretchen at All Things Linguistic noted, framing arguments around ‘debunking myths’ can be problematic, as it can reinforce the presumptions you’re trying to challenge. I think the topics are well chosen, but I also find the ‘mythbusting’ a little uncomfortable; if you’ve never held that prejudice or presumption it can be hard to feel compelled by a chapter - for example, I’d never thought of signed languages as inferior to spoken language (please, I’m not flattering myself here, I didn’t suffer from such a bias because I don’t recall thinking about sign language *at all* before studying linguistics, which is really a more fundamental problem).
The content of each chapter is fairly uniformly excellent. After setting up the initial premise, it is critically situated with the domain of linguistics, and then deconstructed drawing on research. There isn’t a lot of cutting edge work, but it does touch on a lot of ‘classic’ papers. Each work is summarised, but also crucially appraised, with observations about the limitations of the method or the results. If you want to learn how to critically read research, this is the book for you. The length of each chapter is a bit varied, they’re anywhere from 19-35 pages long, and the content can be a bit unpredictable, for example I hadn’t expected such detailed description of the different kinds of non-standard writing shortcuts are used in text messages. The book does not shy away from linguistic terminology, but it does ensure that most of it is made accessible to those reading outside of a class syllabus.
While reading I could already see myself using different chapter of this book in future classes (and I don’t even teach at the moment). Lecturing staff will find this book incredibly useful, and some of the activities may be useful for those teaching smaller classes.
If you only read one chapter of this book, read this one:
I had not expected this, but at the end of the book is a whole chapter on critically reading statistical information. If you only read one chapter that will help you be a more critical reader, make it this one. It definitely throws a lot of information at you, but you can use it as a way to figure out what you need to improve on. There’s still the same engaging yet critical tone as the rest of the book, but it drills more deeply into the data set used to illustrate different concepts such as mean, standard deviation, correlation, and significance.
It should not be possible to finish an undergraduate degree in linguistics and still uncritically believe even one of those myths. It should not be possible to start a (post)graduate program without being able to make sense of the final chapter. Protolinguist me would have loved this book for its rigorous application of research evidence to answering questions about language and its use. Future me is going to love it as an excellent example of critically research appraisal for many years to come.
Kaplan, A. (2016). Women Talk More than Men. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9781107446908 (paperback), 9781107084926 (hardback)
