We have also found evidence to suggest that McCain and Obama have different thinking styles. Whereas McCain tends to be more categorical in his thinking, Obama is more fluid or contextual in the ways he approaches problems. Categorical thinking involves the use of concrete nouns and their associated articles (a, an, the) and suggests that the person is approaching a problem by breaking it down into its component parts and attempting to put it in meaningful categories. Fluid or contextual thinking involves a higher rate of verbs and associated parts of speech (such as gerunds and adverbs).
From James W. Pennebaker's word count analysis of last night's debate, posted this morning on his blog, Wordwatchers.
Pennebaker's research is grounded in the assumption that "the ways that individuals talk and write provide windows into their emotional and cognitive worlds." He as his colleagues Roger J. Booth and Martha E. Francis have developed the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) application, a text analysis software program that quantifies word usage, from which they then conduct further analysis.
Pennebaker's post regarding Summary Comparisons of the Candidates’ Language in Speeches and Interviews is particularly interesting. He's also the subject of He Counts Your Words (Even Those Pronouns) in Tuesday's New York Times.
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