Quantitative Analysis of Spoken Discourse Using Memoirs of Old-time Moviegoers

ABSTRACT

We present the first quantitative analysis of spoken discourse for the Turkish language using memoirs of a group of old-time moviegoers of varying age groups whose birth year spreads over a period of four decades ranging from the 1930s to the 1960s. They tell their experiences by answering a set of questions. Their responses are evaluated comprehensively with the expectation that various attributes of the participants are reflected by their everyday speaking language. We also investigate their language characteristics in terms of their vocabulary richness and word usage. The results show that the age and gender of the participants can be inferred to some extent from their speech, as is the case for written text. However, the difference is not significant in the language use of younger and older respondents in terms of vocabulary richness and archaic word usage. With additional data obtained for some participants, it is shown that text can be accurately identified as being either spoken or written; however, the spoken text of a person can only be differentiated from their written text with the accuracy level of a random guess.

Acknowledgments

The works of the third and fourth authors were partially supported by TÜBİTAK project 115K269 and the İstanbul University Scientific Research Projects Coordination Unit project 25080. This study was done with the data produced from the TÜBİTAK project. The authors are also grateful to Emine Uçar İlbuğa and Mert Gürer, the other researchers of the TÜBİTAK project, for their work as interviewers; and a number of students for recording and transcribing the interviews. We would like to thank Anonymous Referee #1 for his valuable comments and Alper Can for his pointers on presentation.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We plan to share the transcripts with and without interview questions on github.com/sevilcaliskan.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the İstanbul Üniversitesi [25080]; Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştırma Kurumu [115K269].