Beyond English: Considering Language and Culture in Psychological Text Analysis

Dalibor Kučera, Matthias R. Mehl

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

The paper discusses the role of language and culture in the context of quantitative text analysis in psychological research. It reviews current automatic text analysis methods and approaches from the perspective of the unique challenges that can arise when going beyond the default English language. Special attention is paid to closed-vocabulary approaches and related methods (and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count in particular), both from the perspective of cross-cultural research where the analytic process inherently consists of comparing phenomena across cultures and languages and the perspective of generalizability beyond the language and the cultural focus of the original investigation. We highlight the need for a more universal and flexible theoretical and methodological grounding of current research, which includes the linguistic, cultural, and situational specifics of communication, and we provide suggestions for procedures that can be implemented in future studies and facilitate psychological text analysis across languages and cultures.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number819543
JournalFrontiers in Psychology
Volume13
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 4 2022

Keywords

  • LIWC
  • closed-vocabulary approaches
  • cross-language
  • culture
  • natural language processing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Psychology

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