Linguistic analysis of affective speech in psychotherapy: A case grammar approach

The Computer Assisted Language Analysis System (CALAS) was used to examine the relationship of various linguistic measures to outcome measures in high and low verbalized affect segments of 32 patients in psychotherapy. Result s indicated that in the high affect segments, therapists with poor outcome cases used more "cognitive" verbs than therapists with good outcome cases. Therapists in general differed from patients by speaking with a more differ entiated pattern of speech in both the high and low affect segments. Specif ically, therapists used relatively more stative verbs in high affect segmen ts and more action verbs in low affect segments than patients. Therapists a lso included more information in their speech, but spoke more efficiently ( i.e., fewer embedded clauses) than patients. It is suggested that lexical m easures may supplement existing measures in the study of psychotherapy dial ogue.