RESEARCH

Research

Research

1. Gender Roles

The expression “gender role” denotes beliefs about the suitable attitudes, behavior, and actions of females and males. The process of developing a person's gender identity (a sense of being male or female) is influenced by both biological and environmental factors (in the form of parenting and other child-rearing behaviors), although which type of factor has greater influence is still controversial. Most researchers today would agree that biology has an important role in gender identity, at least in certain aspects of gender identity and behavior. In one study, 25 genetically male children who were born with ambiguous genitalia were surgically altered and raised as girls. Now, as older children and teenagers, they prefer male play activities such as sports. Fourteen of these children have openly declared themselves to be boys. (Lindsey, 2010)

A person's culture is also an environmental influence. Although initial cross-cultural studies suggested that cultural differences had little effect on gender roles, more recent research suggests that in the past few decades a change has occurred in cultures that are of different “personalities.” Cultures that are more individualistic and have fairly high standards of living are becoming more non-traditional, especially for women in those cultures; research has shown that more-traditional views seem to be held by collectivistic cultures that have less wealth, although even in these cultures, women were more likely to be less traditional than men. Other studies have found that the most nontraditional ideas about gender roles and gender behavior are found in countries such as the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and England, whereas the most traditional ideas predominate in African and Asian countries such as Nigeria, Pakistan, and Japan. The United States, often seen as very nontraditional by researchers, actually was somewhere in the middle in these studies, perhaps due to the large variation in subcultures that exists within this multicultural country. Environment, even in the form of culture, seems to play at least a partial and perhaps dominant role in gender behavior.

2. Effects of Language On Technology

Language affects technology just like technology affects language. The field of natural-language processing, or computational linguistics, as it is sometimes called, addresses the problem of getting computers to perform useful tasks involving human languages. Computer applications that fall under this description range from the now ubiquitous spelling and grammar correctors found in most word processors to complex systems that can recognize spoken utterances in one language and simultaneously translate them to another. (Goddard, 2011)

The easiest way to see what is involved in this endeavor is to think about the various computers and robots from science fiction that have been portrayed using natural language to communicate. What would these computers have to have known about human languages to be able to understand and participate in normal conversations with human beings? Fortunately, linguists have provided us with the following classification of the different kinds of knowledge that humans bring to bear when using language:

Syntax: The ordering, grouping, and dependency relationships among words in simple utterances

Semantics: The relationship between linguistic ...