The primary purpose of the study was to examine the impact of the length of juvenile offenders' stay in a residential facility on attitudinal changes, measured by language use of 22 participants' interviews analyzed by using a computerized text tool called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to obtain a measure of language use. A series of one-way ANOVA (SPSS 18.0 version) were used to examine the differences between the groups identified by the length of stay and interview interval. The

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... sults indicate that the length of stay significantly impacts language use regarding the language categories of affective process words and personal concerns. Participants with shorter residence (less than 1 month) expressed a higher rate of negative and money-related words while the group with longer residence (more than 5 months) tended to yield a higher rate of cognitive process words. Findings demonstrate how language expressions may provide a concrete indicator of adjudicated adolescents' own cognitive or attitudinal changes over time.