Sounding Depressed a Losing Strategy

James Taranto discusses a study that was made of the speech patterns of the four presidential and vice presidential candidates from 2004. The results are interesting:

The Washington Post's Richard Morin reports on an amusing study in which University of Texas researchers "collected transcripts of 271 televised interviews, news conferences, town hall meetings and candidate debates conducted in 2004" and, by cataloging "subtle but distinctive linguistic patterns," made various comparisons of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Kedwards:

Cheney easily sounded the smartest of the four, while Edwards and Bush favored the least sophisticated language patterns, Slatcher and his colleagues report in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Research in Personality. When it came to sounding presidential, both Bush and his running mate scored considerably higher than Kerry or Edwards. Bush was the oldest-sounding candidate. Edwards also was the most likely to use feminine speech patterns and "female" words (Bush was a close second), while Cheney sounded most like a man's man.

The vice president sounded the most honest of the four, and Kerry the least. Kerry's language also was most like that of a depressed person, followed by Edwards.

It was not reported which candidate sounded the most "French".