Do New Romantic Couples Use More Similar Language Over Time? Evidence from Intensive Longitudinal Text Messages.
Level 4 - case-series / case-control
Longitudinal observational study without a control group
PubMed 34335083 · doi:10.1093/joc/jqab012
What was done
Researchers evaluated a corpus of over 1 million text messages sent between 41 college-age romantic couples during their first year of dating. Using nonlinear growth models, they measured daily linguistic alignment across three dimensions: syntactic (language style matching), semantic (latent semantic analysis), and overall (cosine similarity).
What was found
Daily linguistic alignment across all three dimensions (syntactic, semantic, and overall cosine similarity) followed an exponential growth trajectory toward an asymptote as relationships formed. The abstract reports the functional form and direction of change but provides no specific numerical values, effect sizes, or test statistics.
Why it matters
It demonstrates that communication accommodation theory applies to digital text messaging during romantic relationship formation using longitudinal digital trace data.
Limits
The sample is small (41 couples) and restricted to college-age participants. There is no non-romantic or platonic control group, face-to-face and non-text interactions were unmeasured, and the abstract omits exact quantitative estimates.