Narrative Detector: What a Narrator’s Speech Can Reveal

For centuries, linguists focused almost exclusively on written language, and for good reason. Texts recorded on paper are easier to collect, analyze, and store—they can be subjected to any necessary manipulation. But in the early 20th century, scholars finally turned their attention to spoken language, which, as it turned out, operates by entirely different rules. Stories about dreams, tales of a robbed farmer, and plots involving a missing frog all became subjects of study.

Early Research into Spoken Language

One of the first to study spoken language was American linguist Gladys Borchers. In 1927, she published her dissertation comparing the written and spoken language of ten famous English and American figures, including Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. She found that in speech, they used the imperative mood, as well as interrogative and exclamatory sentences, more often, and used fewer compound and declarative sentences compared to their writing.

This result was expected, but since then, researchers have conducted many more experiments with even more intriguing findings. For example, in 1980, American linguists Price and Graves published a study on gender differences in the oral and written stories of eighth graders. Surprisingly, boys used more words when speaking than writing, while girls did the opposite.

Dream Narratives and Signs of Neurosis

“Dream Narratives” was a study conducted in the 2000s by a group of linguists from Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow State University, and the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with psychoneurologists from Sechenov Medical Academy. The researchers wanted to find out what features in children’s and adolescents’ dream stories could serve as indicators of neurotic disorders. They worked with 114 subjects—78 with neuroses and 36 healthy. Immediately after waking, participants were asked to talk about their dreams, which were recorded for later transcription and analysis.

It’s well known that sleep disorders are a side effect of neurosis. An experienced psychoanalyst can learn a lot about a patient through their dreams. But is this perspective objective? One analyst might say one thing, another something else, and a third might not connect with the patient at all. To get a more reliable picture of a patient’s inner motives, it helps to approach dream interpretation from a linguistic angle as well.

Consider, for example, a dream told by a healthy child in the experiment:

“We went somewhere with the class. We entered a house. There were stairs. And water. We stood on a big raft and crossed to the other side, then we went out the door. There was a door, a yellow one, we opened it and went out, and we ended up at a fair. There were… all kinds of toys for sale… And the sellers were animals. Then we went through another door. There was a path. We walked along the path and ended up at school.”

This dream consists of five episodes: the start of the journey, the house, exiting through the door, the fair, and returning to school. Events follow in proper chronological order—the plot unfolds smoothly without abrupt jumps from topic to topic.

Now, compare this to a dream from a child with depressive disorder:

“Um… I was at home, with my mom and brother. Well… well, my cat was in the dream too. Well, yeah. For a long time, it was just us at home, doing things. Uh-huh. Then I suddenly felt anxious, looked out the window, and there was a fire truck outside our building. I saw flames coming out, and… I didn’t know what to do: dad wasn’t there, and for some reason, I felt like I had to solve everything, didn’t know how to save us. I could have run down the stairs, the elevators weren’t working, but with mom… my mom is sick! I struggled for a long time… Then I woke up.”

This dream is much longer than the “healthy” one. Its essence isn’t in the events themselves, but in the heroine’s struggles to make sense of a confusing situation. Dream and reality are mixed here. The narrator clearly steps outside the dream in the words “my mom is sick!” She constantly evaluates what’s happening and frequently uses the word “but.” In neurotic stories, “but” appears twice as often, as if the child knows the normal order of things but keeps focusing on how it’s disrupted.

One stage of analysis is identifying key words in the story. At this point, neurotic stories stand out: they almost always describe fragmented, meaningless actions and unattained goals. If there’s no action at all, expect descriptions of body parts and organs, wild animals and criminals, exotic and mystical beings, and, of course, details about the mother-child relationship. Stories with a bias toward negative words and themes like “Illness,” “Death,” “Extreme Events,” and “Moral Character” are also considered “typically neurotic.”

The Pear Theft and Cultural Differences

Perhaps the most famous study of spoken language is American linguist Wallace Chafe’s “Pear Stories” experiment. In the mid-1970s, he wanted to see how the same plot would be retold by different people and what this could reveal about their perception, language choices, or cultural differences. Chafe filmed a six-minute movie about a boy stealing a basket of pears from a farmer.

The film takes place in an abstract warm country, and the characters don’t say a word. Participants had to explain everything they saw. Here, narrators encountered carefully placed obstacles: the film’s visual field tested viewers’ attention and interpretation skills. For example, in the second minute, a man with a goat appears, walks past the pear picker, and disappears. Whether he was there or not is irrelevant to the plot, but including or omitting him in the retelling shows how people process secondary information.

Or take the scene where the boy, distracted by a girl, hits a rock and falls off his bike—this tests how the viewer explains cause-and-effect events. Or the strange ping-pong toy in a passerby’s hands? No language in the world has a name for it—the speaker must find a way to describe it. The final, dramatic scene: the farmer discovers he’s been robbed and sees the children walking away, eating his pears. This forces the narrator to draw a moral and express emotions.

Chafe tested his experiment in over 15 languages (including the Mayan language Sakapultek), with about 20 people per language. For analysis, he and his colleagues transcribed the stories, broke them into elementary statements, marked pauses, speech disfluencies like “uh” between thoughts, and intonation features.

They found that speakers think and put thoughts into words almost simultaneously, while writers naturally keep a distance between these processes (writing is ten times slower than speaking). But spoken language doesn’t flow in a single stream; it moves in bursts, or intonation units, as Chafe called them. Each unit introduces one new piece of information and reflects the narrator’s focus at that moment.

Besides linguistic rules, a narrator’s cultural background also plays a role. For example, Americans talked about the film as a film—using cinematic language to comment on the quality of the shots, noting poor sound, weak costume design, or unnatural colors. In short, they tried to show off their film expertise. Greeks, on the other hand, saw themselves as experts on life and talked about the film’s events: discussing the characters, morality, and the quiet joy of working the land. Ignoring form, they focused only on content—so Greek retellings averaged 84 words, almost half as many as the Americans’ 125 words.

Perception of Time and Grammar

The average person might not notice, but linguists know: oral stories can be very different. There’s “spontaneous speech” (phone conversations, dream retellings, or professors discussing research), retelling a film, and, finally, describing static pictures. The last type was studied in the 1980s by American psycholinguist Dan Slobin.

He wondered: how is time expressed in English and Hebrew stories? In Hebrew, you can only talk about the past, present, and future (as in Russian), but English has a wealth of verb forms. For his experiment, Slobin created a book of 24 pictures about a boy whose frog runs away, and he and his dog go searching for it. The book had no words, just the phrase “Where are you, frog?” on the cover.

Slobin asked children and adults to retell the story. He became so interested that he included not only English and Hebrew speakers, but also Spanish, German, and Turkish speakers. He found that grammar shapes how people tell stories: English speakers mark the duration of actions, Spanish speakers focus on completion, Germans describe the trajectory of movement in detail, Hebrew speakers are indifferent to temporal nuances, and Turks pay little attention to character traits.

“I am convinced that people experience the events of this little book differently depending on the language they speak. But there’s nothing in the pictures themselves that forces them to describe them one way or another,” Slobin writes. This puts him among those who believe language shapes our perception of reality (while others argue that language and consciousness exist independently).

To support his theory, Slobin notes that people don’t experience grammatical categories in everyday life. Of course, things happen at certain times and places, but only language makes us perceive them as completed or ongoing, for example. Just think of the English example: nothing in the outside world tells us when to translate the Russian “Она ушла” as “She went” or “She has gone.” This is something in our minds, accessible only through language.