Candidates dumb down speech for relateability

If the 2016 presidential candidates competed on the television show, “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?” some of them would do well to save their lifelines for the English section.

Trump, for example, uses fifth grade level grammar in his speeches, on average, a recent CMU linguistics study found. Similarly, the study found Sanders, who spoke at his first Pittsburgh rally Thursday, uses the same elementary school level language. Cruz uses sixth grade level grammar, and Clinton spoke at a seventh grade level.

In early March, Principal Systems Scientist Maxine Eskenazi and Graduate Research Assistant Elliot Schumacher from Carnegie Mellon University published the study called, “A Readability Analysis of Campaign Speeches” from the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign at the Language Technologies Institute at CMU. Eskenazi and Schumacher examined the grammar and vocabulary levels of five candidates’ campaign announcement speeches: Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio — who has since dropped out — Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

John Kasich, though, was not included in the study.

The researchers said the low level is meant to appeal to more voters, but Pitt linguistics professor Scott Kiesling said the ease of understanding does not translate to creating a relationship with the listener.

Kristin Kanthak, an associate professor from Pitt’s Department of Political Science, said candidates may speak at a lower grade level in order to appear more relatable when discussing issues such as the national debt and equal pay among men and women.

“Candidates are probably not specifically trying to speak at a low level, but rather are trying to be sure they can be understood by a large number of people. It is much more important that candidates [are] understood than it is for them to use sophisticated speech,” Kanthak said.

As an example, Kanthak cited a moment from the 1992 election when Republican candidate George H.W. Bush misunderstood a voter’s question about how national debt had affected him personally. His opponent, Bill Clinton, realized the voter was referring to “hard economic times” while Bush was still puzzled because the national debt did not affect many people personally.

“Speaking at too high of a level would hurt a candidate who is trying to appear relatable [and could also] hurt a candidate if he or she makes errors in speech, but speaking simply and clearly is unlikely to have much of a down side,” Kanthak said.

Additionally, an article from The Boston Globe in October 2015 said in the 21st century, a majority of the public is used to 140-character Twitter tweets and 10-second television sound bites, which is why lower leveled speeches appeal more to the public.

For example, Trump is easily understood by voters and has outperformed his opponents during several moments of the presidential race, such as debates. According to The Boston Globe article, former candidates Mike Huckabee and Jim Gilmore, who both spoke at a 10th-grade level, struggled to appeal to and gather support from Americans and ultimately dropped out of the presidential race.

According to Eskenazi and Schumacher, previous tools such as the Flesch-Kinkaid readability tests, which measures how easy or hard a text is to read and understand, concentrate on the readability of written speeches. They wanted to conduct a study that focused on spoken speech, which is more commonly used during the presidential races.

Spoken speech is composed of repetition and incomplete sentences and speakers can alter the words during their speech. Written speech is a permanent text that speakers do not change.

“When we speak, we usually use less structured language with shorter sentences,” Eskenazi said. “So while models like Flesch-Kinkaid are appropriate for written speech, they are not really reflective of the structure of spoken language.”

A portion of the study specifically compares the grammar levels used for the 2016 candidates and past presidents. Abraham Lincoln had the highest level at 11th grade, and George W. Bush and Trump had the lowest at fifth grade. The others leveled between sixth and seventh grades.

Kanthak provides an example involving Rubio when he stated in a debate that America needed “more welders and less philosophers.” The grammatically correct term he should have used is “fewer philosophers.” But Kanthak said he may have used “less” on purpose in order to appeal to the voters.

“I’m sure he’d rehearsed it too, and I’m sure he knew it was wrong. Fewer philosophers probably sounds a little pretentious, which is exactly what Rubio was trying to avoid,” Kantak said.

Kiesling discredits Eskenazi and Schumacher’s research and other related studies, which he said only focus on the length of words in a sentence.

“[That] is not really the best way to measure sentence complexity. This misses a lot of what goes into complexity in language,” Kiesling said.

Kiesling said the study looks for specific parts of speech, such as those that might have come from a scholarly paper or other academic essay, that an average audience member may not understand.

“Presidents are unlikely to be elected based on how well they can mimic an essay in their speech talk. What you probably want is someone who can connect appropriately with their audience, which is generally not evaluators of essays,” Kiesling said.

To support his opinion, Kiesling personally tested the Flesch-Kinkaid measure, which is popularly used to evaluate the grade level of a written text.

Kiesling typed “colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” a nonsensical phrase, into the Flesch-Kinkaid input system. The system scored the phrase as a 12th grade level, showing that he could easily manipulate the system.

“Rather than telling us about the intelligence and education of the candidate,” Kiesling said,” it tells us what kind of persona the candidate is creating and what kinds of interpersonal stances they are taking with the public.”