A complex study of siblings’ personality traits and implicit speech features

Abstract

The article presents the results of a complex psychological and linguistic study that focuses on the specific features of siblings' speech. The author conducted a synchronous instrumental study of the data obtained through a personality questionnaire and of the respondents' functional-dynamic speech complexes. The hypothesis was that birth order influences siblings' speech more than any other factor (this hypothesis is based on the confirmation of the influence of birth order on speakers' personality traits). The experiment involved pairs of siblings. Only same-gender pairs took part in the study in order to reduce the number of controlling factors. The participants were chosen from among volunteers and in accordance with inclusion and exclusion criteria developed for the study. The participants provided audio recordings of prepared and spontaneous speech. A complex study of implicit features of siblings' speech required different types of analyses to handle different types of data. The study used the Temperament and Character Inventory (the TCI-140 version) to identify the personality traits of the participants, a formant analysis to obtain frequencies of the participants' speech, and 2B-PLS multivariate covariance analysis to identify implicit connections between the results of the two other methods. This experimental design made it possible to carry out a comprehensive study of the speakers' personality traits and their speech. The pilot study showed that the commonality of phonological data for the pairs of siblings is mostly explained by their personality traits, while birth order is an implicit factor with the highest weight in the system. The next step of the experiment is to work with different-gender pairs of siblings.