"Function words are essentially the filler words," Pennebaker says. "These are the words that we don't pay attention to, and they're the ones that are so interesting."
According to the way that Pennebaker organizes language, the words that we more often focus on in conversation are content words, words like "school," "family," "live," "friends" — words that conjure a specific image and relay more of the substance of what is being discussed.
"I speak bad Spanish," Pennebaker explains, "and if I'm in a conversation where I'm listening to the other person speak, I am just trying to find out what they are talking about. I am listening to 'what, where, when' — those big content heavy words. All those little words in between, I don't listen to those because they're too complex to listen to."
In fact, says Pennebaker, even in our native language, these function words are basically invisible to us.
"You can't hear them," Pennebaker says. "Humans just aren't able to do it."
But computers can, which is why two decades ago Pennebaker and his graduate students sat down to build themselves a computer program.
The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program that Pennebaker and his students built in the early 1990s has — like any computer program — an ability to peer into massive data sets and discern patterns that no human could ever hope to match.
And so after Pennebaker and his crew built the program, they used it to ask all kinds of questions that had previously been too complicated or difficult for humans to ask.
Some of those questions included:
- Could you tell if someone was lying by carefully analyzing the way they used function words?
- Looking only at a transcript, could you tell from function words whether someone was male or female, rich or poor?
- What could you tell about relationships by looking at the way two people spoke to each other?
See, one of the things that Pennebaker did was record and transcribe conversations that took place between people on speed dates. He fed these conversations into his program along with information about how the people themselves were perceiving the dates. What he found surprised him.
"We can predict by analyzing their language, who will go on a date — who will match — at rates better than the people themselves," he says.
by Alix Spiegal, NPR | Read more:
Illustration: iStockphoto.com
