Relation of Linguistic Indicators to Civic Engagement in Special Education

This study explores the use of natural language processing to examine the relationship between linguistic features and reported levels of civic engagement among parents of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Specifically, linear regression analyses were conducted with multiple sentiment and semantic similarity variables extracted through linguistic analyses to predict parents¿½f open-ended responses on four civic engagement scales: civic activity, electoral activity, political activity, and broad civic engagement. The resulting models were found to be significant for civic activity and electoral activity; specifically, the linguistic features explained 7\% and 4\% of the variance of the subscale scores, respectively. In particular, adverbs with positive sentiment were negatively correlated with civic activity while greater semantic similarity in terms of consistency within the text were positively correlated to civic activity. Further, parents¿½f responses with greater semantic similarity when compared with words associated to civic engagement was a significant predictor for electoral activity.