Just in time for Valentine’s Day! A study recently published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, has been investigating the link between language and successful relationships: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/22/1/39
The researchers wanted to establish if people who spoke in similar styles were more compatible. They focused on the social use of function words. Function words generally express a grammatical relationship between content words, and some examples include the, a, be, that, will, and him. They are generally difficult to define and dont mean much by themselves. They should not be confused with content words, which are more easily definable and typically include nouns and verbs such as chair or run.
The authors state that although function words dont necessarily convey the main content of what a person wants to say, they are highly social in use. The authors used custom-designed computer software to compare language styles between conversational pairs. In one experiment, conversations were recorded of college students on 4-minute speed dates. While the content in all conversations was very similar topics nearly always included choice of degree and where regionally the speakers were from language styles differed markedly, through the use of function words. The pairs scoring above average on language style matching scores were almost four times as likely to want future contact as pairs who had differing speaking styles.
Similarly, analysis of online chats between dating couples over 10 days revealed that almost 80% of the couples whose writing style matched were still dating three months later, compared with approximately 54% of the couples who didn’t match as well.
The authors concluded that in terms of relationship compatibility, the content of what people say to each other is important, but perhaps not as important as how they choose to say it. They have made their language-matching programme available online for pairs to test themselves – http://www.utpsyc.org/synch/
Sarah Bennington February 2011
Written on behalf of Integrated Treatment Services. ITS is a private Speech and Language Therapy service based in Leicestershire and the East Midlands. It specialises in providing highly-skilled Speech and Language Therapists, but also associates with other therapeutic professionals, including Occupational Therapists, Physiotherapists, Psychologists and Arts Therapists.
