The Relationship between Legibility, Age, and Gender: Exploring Free-Form Handwriting

This paper examines the potential relationship between free-form handwriting (i.e., unstructured ways of writing words, phrases, or sentences by hand) and two sociolinguistic variables: the writer’s (1) age and (2) gender. While the accuracy of “gender guessing” or gender identification (e.g., Grieve, 2010; Al-Suwaiyan, 2010; Johnson, 2013) has been the focus in previous studies, this exploratory study looks at the potential correlation between numerically scaled legibility of handwritten samples and the observers’ identification of the writer’s gender and age based on survey data. This type of survey relates to studies of perceptions and attitudes, linguistic markers and identifications, and interlinguistic variation. Clearly, individuals may form judgments and prejudices based on factors such as accents, racial backgrounds, and sociocultural orientations, but interpretations and judgments of writing samples (especially based on legibility) have not been sufficiently analyzed. Conveniently sampled participants were given an informal survey in which they were asked to rate several handwriting samples for legibility and the age and gender of writer. All of the handwritten samples were sentence length and devoid of context. To identify if some patterns of responses were only related to English, two of the samples were written in Korean. In line with previous studies, a majority of participants correctly identified the gender (and age) of the samples with high percentages for English. The Korean samples, while still relatively accurate, were less precise, when compared with the English samples. Results of this study followed the expected trend with less legibly scaled samples having a higher percentage of being male LEGIBILITY AND GENDER 3 gendered and higher legibly scaled samples having an increased percentage of being female gendered. Implications related to sociolinguistic perceptions, potential future research, and the importance of awareness of stereotypes will be discussed during the presentation. LEGIBILITY AND GENDER 4