Research Task

1. Research Task By Moya Dawson, Stephen Watson and Matthew Nixon

2. Zimmerman & West They found the following: • In 20 same sex conversations there were 22 overlaps and 7 interruptions. • In 11 mixed conversations there were 9 overlaps by men and 0 by women and 46 interruptions men and 2 by women.

3. Our Findings • Males dominate mixed gender conversations showing their authority. • Women tend to use a lot of fillers such as erm and yea/yer to build up their sentences. This also shows hesitation in what they are saying. • Mixed: Women also tend to interrupt one another when they want the other woman to stop talking and listen to them for once, however men seek over prestige in the conversation and interrupt to express their point of view much more often.

4. How do these relate to other’s findings? • Similarly to Zimmerman and West’s findings, we found that in conversations both genders tend to overlap and interrupt other speakers in order to voice their own opinion. • Also a similarity I terms of theories with our work is Labov’s idea of overt and covert prestige. We spotted this contrast most in the mixed conversation as it was easy to see that the lady in the conversation used less slang and colloquialisms and used more overt rather than covert prestige.

5. Pro’s and Cons of our findings. Pro’s: • Links in well with other theorists ideas like Labov, Lakoff as well as Zimmerman and west. • It shows us a more real life scenario rather than just reading findings. Con’s: -Our sample was only on three conversations so although it gives us accurate findings it doesn’t give us a large and general samle.

6. Conclusion The results we have found our self portray similar trends to that of Zimmerman and West, they demonstrate how men do interrupt more than women however the sample size we have was only limited.