Can we detect conditioned variation in political speech? two kinds of discussion and types of conversation

Abstract

Previous work has demonstrated that certain speech patterns vary systematically between sociodemographic groups, so that in some cases the way a person speaks is a valid cue to group membership. Our work addresses whether or not participants use these linguistic cues when assessing a speaker’s likely political identity. We use a database of speeches by U.S. Congressional representatives to isolate words that are statistically diagnostic of a speaker’s party identity. In a series of four studies, we demonstrate that participants’ judgments track variation in word usage between the two parties more often than chance, and that this effect persists even when potentially interfering cues such as the meaning of the word are controlled for. Our results are consistent with a body of literature suggesting that humans’ language-related judgments reflect the statistical distributions of our environment.