Theorist, Deborah Tannen, stated that "Male-female conversation is cross-cultural communication"(A First Look at Communication Theory, Genderlect Styles, page 435).  Tannen is a linguistics professor who has spent her career researching the way people communicate.  Deborah Tannen acknowledges the extreme differences in conversational styles among men and women.  Tannen claims that during communication with the opposite sex it is sometimes as if they appear to be speaking, "different words from different worlds," (A First Look at Communication Theory, Genderlect Styles, page 435).  The term, genderlect, is appropriate to use when discussing the research of Deborah Tannen.  Genderlect states that masculine and feminine styles of discourse are best viewed as two distinct cultural dialects.