Abstract.This paper explores differences between male and female writing in a large subset of the British National Corpus covering a range of genres. Several classes of simple lexical and syntactic features that differ substantially according to author gender are identified, both in fiction and in non-fiction documents. In particular, we find significant differences between male-and female-authored documents in the use of pronouns and certain types of noun modifiers: although the total number of nominals used by male and female authors is virtually identical, females use many more pronouns and males use many more noun specifiers. More generally , it is found that even in formal writing, female writing exhibits greater usage of features identified by previous researchers as "involved" while male writing exhibits greater usage of features which have been identified as "informational". Finally, a strong correlation between the characteristics of male (female) writing and those of nonfiction (fiction) is demonstrated.

The objective of this paper was to employ a functional linguistic approach to explore pragmatic failure in the spontaneous speech of subjects with pervasive developmental disorders (PDD). Patterns of intonation use were compared among subjects with Asperger's syndrome (AS), high-functioning autism (HFA), and psychiatric out-patient controls (OPC) with a variety of non-specific social problems. Written transcripts and audio-recordings were used to measure rates of various intonation types relative to the amount of speech produced. The major finding of the study was that the HFA subjects less often tend to employ useful patterns of intonation for communication than the AS or OPC groups. This suggests that HFA either send random intonation signals to hearers or else demonstrate systematic misuse of the linguistic system. AS subjects differed little from the controls. The implications of these results for understanding the communicative failure of PDD subjects is discussed.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) involves, according to theory, an underlying impairment of executive function—the cognitively based control system that regulates behavior. It is possible that this executive dysfunction interferes with performance on certain tasks used to identify language impairment (LI). We compared the performance of 3 groups of children aged 7 to 11 years: ADHDonly ( n = 25), ADHD+LI ( n = 28), and non-ADHD controls ( n = 24), on 18 tasks within 3 language measures (Test of Word Finding, Rosner’s Auditory Analysis Test, Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Revised). Children with ADHD-only performed like those without the disorder on most tasks examined. However, the CELF-R Formulated Sentences subtest was particularly difficult for children with ADHD-only. In-depth error analysis indicated that aspects of the executive dysfunction in ADHD such as impulsivity and pragmatic deficits may have influenced performance on this subtest. Clinical implications for testing children with ADHD are discussed.

Prominent formal thought disorder, expressed as unusual language in speech and writing, is often a central feature of schizophrenia. Since a more comprehensive understanding of phenomenology surrounding thought disorder is needed, this study investigates these processes by examining writing in schizophrenia by novel computer-aided analysis.Thirty-six patients with DSM-IV criteria chronic schizophrenia provided a page of writing (300-500 words) on a designated subject. Writing was examined by automated text categorization and compared with non-psychiatrically ill individuals, investigating any differences with regards to lexical and syntactical features. Computerized methods utilized included extracting relevant text features, and utilizing machine learning techniques to induce mathematical models distinguishing between texts belonging to different categories. Observations indicated that automated methods distinguish schizophrenia writing with 83.3% accuracy. Results reflect underlying impaired processes including semantic deficit, independently establishing connection between primary pathology and language.

Investigated the use of cohesive links to create a reciprocal conversation in individuals with autism, Asperger syndrome, and a control group of children and adolescents with nonspecific social problems. All subjects engaged in a 10-minute conversation with an examiner that touched on various topics. The conversation was audiotaped, transcribed, and coded blindly for several types of cohesive links. Compared to controls, the higher functioning autistic group referred less to a previous stretch of the conversation and more to an aspect of the physical environment. The Asperger group, on the other hand, was very similar to the controls except they made more unclear references that were difficult to interpret. Implications of these findings for understanding the communicative failure of subjects with pervasive developmental disorder are discussed.