Group items tagged

Native languages are usually acquired in emotional, natural contexts, while foreign languages are typically learned through neutral, academic ones. As this article dives into how foreign languages affect emotional processing as compared to native languages, it finds data that shows that the emotional reactivity of bilinguals does decrease with foreign language use.

This study from the University of Pennsylvania explores whether or not Asian-Americans have a certain "sound" to their speaking that distinguishes them from their White counterparts. White and Asian-American audio samples were curated for a test group to listen to in order to guess their races. On average, White and Asian-American participants in the study were around 65% accurate in their guesses, suggesting more success than random guessing. Some individual participants had accuracy as high as 85% or 90%. Some audio samples yielded guesses that were accurate upwards of 90% of the time. Asian-American participants were often more accurate in their guesses, but less able to express how they knew. White participants described the "upspeak" often used as a "lack of assertiveness." They also identified "increased pauses between words" and "jerkier speech". They also noted that Asian Americans used more "filler material" in their sentences like "um," "uh," or "like." I thought that was interesting because in Japanese, similar filler words like あのう and ええと are used. In Indonesian, we often hum as a filler, which I found to be different than typical English speakers' hums, and that I as a bilingual person have started to do when speaking English as well.

This article describes the debate between prescriptivists and descriptivists in terms of language use and change. Prescriptivists believe in traditional grammar and vocabulary while descriptivists analyze how language evolves over time. The article goes on to talk about how language changes naturally but remains cohesive due to its systematic nature.

This article explored who has control over language. It touches upon how certain words eventually get used in contexts that it was not originally intended to be. It concludes that language is too complex for anyone to attempt to manage. Language is a genius self-regulating system.

This article talks about the way that sarcasm is used in speech and the impact that it has on the meaning of messages and how it changes in different contexts.