Using LIWC and Coh-Metrix to Investigate Gender Differences in Linguistic Styles

Abstract

We use computational linguistic tools to investigate gender differences in language use within the context of marital conflict. Using the Language Inquiry and Word Count tool (LIWC), differences between genders were significant for the use of self references, but not for the use of social words and positive and negative emotion words. Using Coh-Metrix, differences were significant for the use of syntactic complexity, global argument overlap, and density of logical connectors but not for the use of word frequency, frequency of causal verbs and particles, global Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), local argument overlap, and local LSA. These results confirmed some expectations but failed to confirm the majority of the expectations based on the biological theory of gender, which defines gender in terms of biological sex resulting in polarized and static language differences based on the speaker’s gender.