Speech Patterns Reveal the Quality of a Relationship

According to a new study, analyzing the language patterns of a couple's communication can reveal the quality of their relationship.

By Kathryn Hawkins. Posted on October 08 2010

In Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy wrote that “all happy families are alike.” And according to a new study, they sound alike, too.

It’s long been known that most people will change their tone and word useage somewhat depending on the people they’re talking to—you know how your friend who moved from England a decade ago sounds like a Beatle as soon as he calls his folks back in Liverpool? But a new study asserts that seeing how well two people engage in language style matching (LSM) will indicate whether or not they’re in a good relationship.

“Because style matching is automatic, it serves as an unobtrusive window into people’s close relationships with others,” said James Pennebaker, the study’s co-author and a psychology professor at University of Texas at Austin.

Pennebaker and his partner studied the language used by nearly 2,000 college students as they responded to class assignments written in different styles, from dry and technical to Valley Girl-esque. They found that the students tended to alter their tone to suit the questions or prompts they were responding to.

They also studied letters written between famous writers, including the poet couples Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. The researchers found that analyzing their language patterns provided great insight into their relationship status. “Style words in the spouses’ poems were more similar during happier periods of their relationships and less synchronized toward each relationship’s end,” said researcher Molly Ireland.

So if you want to know whether you and your partner are destined to be together forever, maybe the key isn’t what you say to one another—it’s how you say it.

Filed under: General Interest, Health and Wellbeing,

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