J Psycholinguist Res DOI 10.1007/s10936-014-9341-3 Revealing Word Order: Using Serial Position in Binomials to Predict Properties of the Speaker Rumen Iliev · Anastasia Smirnova © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014 Abstract Three studies test the link between word order in binomials and psychological and demographic characteristics of a speaker. While linguists have already suggested that psychological, cultural and societal factors are important in choosing word order in binomials, the vast majority of relevant research was focused on general factors and on broadly shared cultural conventions. In contrast, in this work we are interested in what word order can tell us about the particular speaker. More specifically, we test the degree to which word order is affected by factors such as gender, race, geographic location, religion, political orientation, and consumer preferences. Using a variety of methodologies and different data sources, we find converging evidence that word order is linked to a broad set of features associated with the speaker. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings and the potential to use word order as a tool for analyzing large text corpora and data on the web. Keywords Word order · Binomials · Subjective distance · On-line data · Automated text analysis Introduction The rapid increase in data availability and gains in computational power provide new oppor- tunities for social sciences (Pang and Lee 2008; Liu 2010; Yarkoni 2012). One challenge that researchers face is to develop methods for extracting psychologically relevant information from text (Argamon et al. 2003; Riedel et al. 2006; Newman et al. 2008; Dam and Kauf- mann 2008; Chung and Pennebaker 2008; Back et al. 2010; Tausczik and Pennebaker 2010; Herdagdelen and Baroni 2011; Diermeier et al. 2011; Sagi et al. 2009; Dehghani et al. 2011; Yarkoni 2010, 2012). In this paper we explore a novel method for inferring properties of a R. Iliev (B) · A. Smirnova University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA e-mail: riliev@umich.edu 123