One of DICTION’s main strengths is that it helps a researcher uncover aspects of a text that are not readily apparent when simply doing a straight read. In this study, the authors made special use of the program’s Activity score, which measures the movement and change within a text, and Realism, which measures language pointing toward highly concrete matters.
Jonathan Rogers, Andrew Van Buskirk and Sarah Zechman of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business used DICTION to quantify the Optimism in the statements of some three hundred communications featured in twenty different lawsuits.
Jeff Collins, David Kaufer and Pantelis of Carnegie Mellon University used DICTION-based strategies to examine these questions of authorship. Their approach was straightforward: compare the frequencies with which Madison and Hamilton used certain lexical strategies in the clearly attributed papers to the word choices in the disputed papers.
Researchers used DICTION to study 700 speech passages from the 2007-2008 election season and compared them with 4,000 passages from presidential candidate speeches from 1948-2004.
Angela K. Davis and Isho Tama-Sweet of the Charles H. Ludquist School of Business at the University of Oregon used DICTION to quantify the amount of pessimism in earnings releases and MD&A sections for 14,000 firm quarters between 1998 and 2003.
David Huffaker and Sandra Calvert of Georgetown University studied 70 blogs written by teenagers from age 13 to 17 to examine similarities and differences between how males and females presented their identities, experiences, and feelings online. The researchers used DICTION to do so, focusing specifically on its Activity, Certainty and Commonality scores to measure the movement, resoluteness, and group values embodied in the teenagers’ texts.
Researchers used DICTION to analyze the sample because it provided a single point of reference across a wide range of rhetorical styles and campaign texts in media.
Welcome to DICTION 6.0
DICTION 6.0, featured in Psychology Today, is a scientific method for determining the tone of a verbal message using a powerful Windows™ based program that searches a passage for five general features as well as thirty-five sub-features. It can process an unlimited number of texts using a 10,000 word corpus.
DICTION 6.0 produces reports about the texts it processes and also writes the results to numeric files for later statistical analysis. Output includes raw totals, percentages, and standardized scores and, for small input files, extrapolations to a 500-word norm.
On a computer with a 2.16 GHz Intel chip and 2 GB of RAM, DICTION can process 3,000 passages (1,500,000 words) in four minutes. The program can accept either individual or multiple-passages and, at your discretion, it provides special counts of orthographic characters and high frequency words.
DICTION 6.0 was developed by Professor Roderick P. Hart, Dean of the College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin and This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , Associate Professor and Department Chair of Communication and Journalism at Lipscomb University.
Diction 6.0 uses dictionaries (word-lists) to search a text for these qualities:
· Certainty - Language indicating resoluteness, inflexibility, and completeness and a tendency to speak ex cathedra.
· Activity - Language featuring movement, change, the implementation of ideas and the avoidance of inertia.
· Optimism - Language endorsing some person, group, concept or event, or highlighting their positive entailments.
· Realism - Language describing tangible, immediate, recognizable matters that affect people's everyday lives.
· Commonality - Language highlighting the agreed-upon values of a group and rejecting idiosyncratic modes of engagement.
