ERIC Number: EJ758833
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2006
Pages: 32
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0163-853X
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Available Date: N/A
Language with Character: A Stratified Corpus Comparison of Individual Differences in E-Mail Communication
Oberlander, Jon; Gill, Alastair J.
Discourse Processes: A Multidisciplinary Journal, v42 n3 p239-270 2006
To what extent does the wording and syntactic form of people's writing reflect their personalities? Using a bottom-up stratified corpus comparison, rather than the top-down content analysis techniques that have been used before, we examine a corpus of e-mail messages elicited from individuals of known personality, as measured by the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised (S. Eysenck, Eysenck, & Barrett, 1985). This method allowed us to isolate linguistic features associated with different personality types, via both word and part-of-speech n-gram analysis. We investigated the extent to which extraversion is associated with linguistic features involving positivity, sociability, complexity, and implicitness and neuroticism is associated with negativity, self-concern, emphasis, and implicitness. Numerous interesting features were uncovered. For instance, higher levels of extraversion involved a preference for adjectives, whereas lower levels of neuroticism involved a preference for adverbs. However, neither positivity nor negativity was as prominent as expected, and there was little evidence for implicitness.
Descriptors: Personality, Computational Linguistics, Content Analysis, Individual Differences, Syntax, Writing (Composition), Computer Mediated Communication, Questionnaires, Neurosis, Extraversion Introversion, Discourse Analysis, Form Classes (Languages)
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. 10 Industrial Avenue, Mahwah, NJ 07430-2262. Tel: 800-926-6579; Tel: 201-258-2200; Fax: 201-236-0072; e-mail: journals@erlbaum.com; Web site: https://www.LEAonline.com
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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Author Affiliations: N/A