The psychology of word use:: A computer program that analyzes texts in Spanish

Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is a computerized text analysis program that calculates the percentage of words in a text according to several dozen categories. LIWC's reliability has been widely demonstrated with the English language. In the present study, 2 studies were carried out to determine the equivalence of the Spanish versus English versions of LIWC. Study 1 presented the translation procedure from English to Spanish, and tested equivalence between categories in the English LIWC and the corresponding categories in the Spanish version. Study 2 examined both the English and Spanish LIWC version by comparing the language used by women in Internet chat rooms for depression and breast cancer. The results showed high correlations across English and Spanish LIWC categories. Furthermore, women in depression chat rooms used different categories of words than women in breast cancer chat rooms, and these differences were similar in chat rooms in English and in Spanish. The implications of using LIWC with the Spanish language are discussed.