Male speech patterns change with female fertility, claims study

Male speech patterns change with female fertility, claims study - The amount of effort men put into being witty when talking to women depends on how fertile the member of the opposite sex is, according to a study.

Researchers from Florida State University studied how men spoke to women when they were at different points in their menstrual cycle and found the more fertile the women were, the more the men varied their sentence structure.

The observations were surprising as the researchers expected the results to be the opposite, as previous studies have shown that when men are attracted to women they tend to mirror their behaviour.

Talking point: The more fertile the woman, the more effort a man makes with his wit, according to researchers

For the study 123 male college students from Florida State University were asked to strike up conversations with five young women at various points in their menstrual cycle.

Study authors Jacqueline M Coyle and Michael P Kaschak, writing in PLoSONE recently, reported that men copied sentence structure 62 per cent of the time when the women were at the low point of their menstrual cycle, compared to just 49.7 per cent at the peak.

They wrote: ‘Our data show that the likelihood of men choosing the same syntactic structure as the women was inversely related to the women's level of fertility - higher levels of fertility were associated with lower levels of linguistic matching.’

Interestingly, women don’t follow suit.

They said: ‘A follow-up study revealed that female participants do not show this same change in linguistic behaviour as a function of changes in their conversation partner's fertility.’

The conclusion they draw is that men are showing off their conversational abilities to boost their credentials as boyfriends.

The authors added: ‘We interpret these findings in the context of recent data suggesting that non-conforming behaviour may be a means of men displaying their fitness as a mate to women.’