A study of individual differences and of interaction in the behaviour of some aspects of language in interviews.
1. Thirty interviews were recorded on an interaction chronograph for time measures, and in a speech recorder. They were conducted by three psychiatrists who each interviewed the same group of ten patients (composed of two sub-groups suffering from anxiety or depression respectively).

2. Certain time measures had previously been shown to be consistent for individual doctors and the two sub-groups of patients.

3. Owing to some spoilt recordings only 25 of the 30 interviews could be transposed to verbatim manuscript form.

4. A grammatical analysis and word count of the language used by doctors and patients was then undertaken. The following measures were subjected to analysis of variance: percentage of nouns and self-references in the total number of words, noun/self-reference ratio, verb/adjective ratio, word or speech rate measured by the number of words per minute of the conversation (i.e., of the individual's action time, not the interview time) or word rate.

5. The results were: highly significant consistency of word rate and self-reference percentage, and of noun/self-reference and verb/adjective ratios, and consistency at the 5 per cent. level of nouns and adjectives for the doctors.

6. For the patients only the verb/adjective ratio proved consistent at the 5 per cent. level, when the figures from all these interviews were compared, but word rate and self-references correlated highly only for interviews with D1 and D2, while in interviews with D3 discrepancies occurred.

7. The most extreme discrepancy occurred in the case of Patient 7 (P7) and as the discrepancy in the case of P8 was, on three counts, (word rate, self-reference percentages and action time), consistently in the opposite direction, the two cases were subjected to a detailed comparative study, linking up the temporal and grammatical quantitative investigation with a structural topic analysis of the content.

8. Data from the available records suggest that word rate, self-references and action time for the patients varied concurrently, word rate correlating inversely with self-references and action time, and action time directly with self-references.

9. The juxtaposition of the discrepancies of P7, and P8 with D3, and of D3 with P7 and P8 over the range of 12 (for patients 13) measures of temporal and linguistic conversational behaviour (and patient's word output on the subject of his illness) shows that other modes of linguistic activity had also changed.
 We were thus able to illustrate in terms of objective measurements that language functions as a unitary process blending aspects of utterance and of content into a closely-knit whole.

10. A classification of D3's questions and responses resulted in the location of that part of the interview where the discrepancy had its roots.