The second approach to male and female talk focused on the ways in which men were seen as controlling and dominating in mixed sex conversations/interactions. Zimmerman & West found in their (albeit small) investigation, that 96% of interruptions in mixed sex conversations were made by men. They saw this as a sign that both women had ristricted linguistic freedom and that men saught to impose their dominance through applying explicit constraints in conversational practice.
Much subsequent research into mixed sex talk concluded that women and men do not hold equal conversational rights. Zimmerman and West later carried out a study of the interactions between parents and children, and concluded that parents interrupted and assumed power in those interractions in the same way that men did in mixed sex conversations.
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