Language Usage in Relationships

Analysis of Language Usage

There are three main quantitative approaches to linguistic analysis that have emerged over the past half-century. The first is judge-based thematic content analysis, which uses human judges to identify the presence of various thematic references (e.g., love, anxiety, and motivation) on the basis of empirically developed coding systems. The second is latent semantic analysis (LSA), a bottom-up approach to language analysis that examines patterns of how words covary across large samples of text, akin to a factor analysis of individual words. LSA can be used, for example, to examine patterns of word use among satisfied couples compared with those who are dissatisfied. The third is word count analysis, which examines the relative frequency of words in a given text or speech sample. Word count programs vary in their designed purposes and complexity of analyses. For example, the General Inquirer, which arose out of the psychoanalytic and need-based traditions in psychology, uses complex decision rules to clarify the meaning of ambiguous words that are used in multiple contexts. Researchers studying language use in politics (e.g., speeches, political advertising, and media coverage) often use Diction, a word count program that characterizes texts by the extent to which they reflect optimism, activity, certainty, realism, and commonality.

One of the most often employed word count programs is Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), which was developed by social psychologists to investigate the words that people use when they write about emotional experiences. LIWC works by searching for words in a given text file that have been previously categorized into more than 70 linguistic dimensions, including standard [Page 960]language categories (e.g., articles, prepositions, and pronouns), psychological processes (e.g., positive and negative emotion words), and traditional content dimensions (e.g., sex, death, home, and occupation). Research using computer programs such as the General Inquirer, Diction, and LIWC has provided substantial evidence of the social and psychological importance of word use. Of particular relevance for intimate relationships are personal pronouns and emotion words. These two broad categories of words and their significance for relationships are described in turn next.

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