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31 The story of Phineas Gage is discussed in George Miller’s book. Alexander Luria described Pavlov’s experiences with his dogs in his classic 1973 book.

32–34 Knowing what pronouns and other words refer to within a given communication based on previous shared knowledge is called common ground. It is so central to communication that it has been studied across various fields and has been written about extensively in psycholinguistics by Herb Clark as a theory of common ground, in linguistics by David Beaver as presupposition theory, and in the cognitive sciences by Phil McCarthy and his colleagues as givenness/newness.

35–36 Unfortunately, the cross-language research is not covered in any detail in this book. My former student Nairán Ramírez-Esparza is discovering some remarkable changes in the ways people think as they switch from English to Spanish and vice versa. For example, bilingual speakers feel that they are more outgoing when speaking English and more reserved when speaking Spanish even though their behaviors show the opposite. Working with Cindy Chung and others, Nairán finds that the ways people think about a topic in Spanish are subtly different than the ways they think about it in English. See also work by Kashima and Kashima (1998).

I’m pretty certain that there is a legal requirement for anyone who writes about language to mention the Whorf Hypothesis (or, if you are an anthropologist, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). In line with these regulations, the extreme version of the Whorf Hypothesis is that one’s language and vocabulary dictates one’s perception. So, for example, if I didn’t have a word for the color orange, I wouldn’t be able to perceive the color. Due to an interesting historical movement in psychology and linguistics, the Whorf Hypothesis was roundly dismissed, beginning in the 1960s. New and more interesting versions of the hypothesis keep returning. The research of Nairán, Lera Boroditsky, and many others is now showing that, in some cases, our language can direct our attention, thinking, and memory.

CHAPTER 3: THE WORDS OF SEX, AGE, AND POWER

40–44 The best summary of our research on sex differences and language is a paper by Matt Newman, Carla Groom, Lori Handelman, and me published in 2008.

41 When people sit in front of a mirror and complete a questionnaire, they use more words like I and me than when the mirror is not present (Davis and Brock, 1975). The nature of self-focus among women has been demonstrated in a series of studies by Barbara Frederickson, Tomi-Ann Roberts, and their colleagues. An interesting take on people’s stereotypes of the ways pronouns work has been shown by Wendi Gardner and her colleagues.

45 Ask any group of people in any culture and they will agree that women talk far more than men. A group of my former students Matthias Mehl, Simine Vazire, Nairán Ramírez, Rich Slatcher, and I ran six experiments in the United States and Mexico where we asked almost four hundred college students to wear a digital tape recorder for two to four days. Everything they said was later transcribed. Surprisingly, across all studies men and women spoke almost exactly the same number of words per day. It is very rare for a study that found absolutely nothing to be published, but the premier journal Science did so in 2007.

46–47 The blog project where we identified authors was conducted by Shlomo Argamon, Moshe Kopel, Jonathan Schler, and me in papers that came out in 2007 and 2009.

49–51 The script paper by Molly Ireland and me is currently under review.

57–60 In addition to the Pennebaker, Groom, Loew, and Dabbs article, see recent work by Jon Maner’s lab as well as by Robert Josephs and his colleagues dealing with testosterone and behavior.

60–63 As we get older, our personalities change. Richard Robins and his colleagues have shown higher self-esteem, John Loehlin and Nick Martin reported increases in emotional stability, and Seider et al. (2009) found greater use of relational pronouns with increasing age. Much of this section