Brinberg Miriam, Ram Nilam
Department of Communication Arts and Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA 16801, USA.
Departments of Communication and Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
J Commun. 2021 Mar 29;71(3):454-477. doi: 10.1093/joc/jqab012. eCollection 2021 Jun.
The digital text traces left by computer-mediated communication (CMC) provide a new opportunity to test theories of relational processes that were originally developed through observation of face-to-face interactions. Communication accommodation theory, for example, suggests that conversation partners' verbal (and non-verbal) behaviors become more similar as relationships develop. Using a corpus of 1+ million text messages that 41 college-age romantic couples sent to each other during their first year of dating, this study examines how linguistic alignment of new romantic couples' CMC changes during relationship formation. Results from nonlinear growth models indicate that three aspects of daily linguistic alignment (syntactic-language style matching, semantic-latent semantic analysis, overall-cosine similarity) all exhibit exponential growth to an asymptote as romantic relationships form. Beyond providing empirical support that communication accommodation theory also applies in romantic partners' CMC, this study demonstrates how relational processes can be examined using digital trace data.
计算机介导的交流（CMC）留下的数字文本痕迹为检验最初通过观察面对面互动而发展起来的关系过程理论提供了新机会。例如，交流顺应理论认为，随着关系的发展，对话伙伴的言语（和非言语）行为会变得更加相似。本研究使用了41对大学年龄的浪漫情侣在恋爱第一年互相发送的100多万条短信语料库，考察了新浪漫情侣的CMC语言趋同在关系形成过程中是如何变化的。非线性增长模型的结果表明，随着浪漫关系的形成，日常语言趋同的三个方面（句法-语言风格匹配、语义-潜在语义分析、总体-余弦相似度）均呈现指数增长至渐近线。除了提供交流顺应理论也适用于浪漫伴侣的CMC的实证支持外，本研究还展示了如何使用数字痕迹数据来检验关系过程。
