BEYOND DOMINANCE: GENDER AND INTERRUPTION IN ONLINE COMMUNICATION

Abstract

Gendered patterns of conversational interruption have been a long-debated topic in sociolinguistics. It has been divided into two broad perspectives: some treat interruption chiefly as a marker of dominance, in which one speaker seizes the floor at another's expense, while others argue that interruption can serve cooperative or epistemic functions unrelated to control, with the same surface form, overlapping or simultaneous speech, serving markedly different interactional functions depending on context. This study examines gendered interruption in two Moroccan samples, comparing face-to-face focus-group discussion with parallel WhatsApp group messaging drawn from another peer group at a different institution. It applies a four-category coding framework, distinguishing competitive, corrective, and supportive interruption in face-to-face talk from a WhatsApp-specific sequential thread-bypass category, and asks whether the traditional dominance account adequately explains the patterns observed. A combined qualitative and quantitative approach was used, drawing on coded focus-group transcripts and a message-by-message coding of the WhatsApp corpus across both media. Findings show that female participants account for a higher share of interruptive and bypass events in the competitive and corrective functions across both settings, but not in the supportive function, where face-to-face overlap skews male while its WhatsApp analog skews female, the one function whose direction differs across media; none of these contrasts reach conventional statistical significance at this sample size and are reported descriptively throughout. Because the two media make different aspects of interaction observable, the study treats cross-medium comparison as a problem of operationalization rather than assuming that interruption constitutes an equivalent countable unit in both settings. Once this is accounted for, competitive floor-competition occurs markedly less often on WhatsApp than face-to-face, even though it still skews female, and corrective interruption, while female-led in both settings, occurs several times more often face-to-face than on WhatsApp, suggesting that direct floor competition specifically does not transfer to asynchronous messaging in the form it takes face-to-face. The study complicates the traditional dominance account without simply reversing it, and offers a medium-sensitive framework for future research on gendered interruption in offline and digital settings.