Student-teacher communication preferences in Taiwanese older learners.

The role of teacher-student communication in enhancing the learning experience of older learners has received limited attention. This sociolinguistic study addresses this gap by examining the perspectives on this issue held by Taiwanese older learners. Survey data from 231 Taiwanese older learners were analyzed using ANOVA and independent-samples t-tests, with the aim of establishing how their age ranges and occupational backgrounds influenced their concordance with teacher communication strategies found in existing literature. While teachers were reported to assume that older learners from elite backgrounds preferred more communication accommodation in class, this study's results indicated that those with no work experience or who identified as farmers demanded greater respect, flexibility, and diversity of language codes. Age was also significantly correlated with learners' communication preferences, with those aged 76+ requiring more extensive accommodations than their younger counterparts did.

Large Language Models: A Historical and Sociocultural Perspective.

This letter explores the intricate historical and contemporary links between large language models (LLMs) and cognitive science through the lens of information theory, statistical language models, and socioanthropological linguistic theories. The emergence of LLMs highlights the enduring significance of information-based and statistical learning theories in understanding human communication. These theories, initially proposed in the mid-20th century, offered a visionary framework for integrating computational science, social sciences, and humanities, which nonetheless was not fully fulfilled at that time. The subsequent development of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, especially since the 1970s, provided critical perspectives and empirical methods that both challenged and enriched this framework. This letter proposes that two pivotal concepts derived from this development, metapragmatic function and indexicality, offer a fruitful theoretical perspective for integrating the semantic, textual, and pragmatic, contextual dimensions of communication, an amalgamation that contemporary LLMs have yet to fully achieve. The author believes that contemporary cognitive science is at a crucial crossroads, where fostering interdisciplinary dialogues among computational linguistics, social linguistics and linguistic anthropology, and cognitive and social psychology is in particular imperative. Such collaboration is vital to bridge the computational, cognitive, and sociocultural aspects of human communication and human-AI interaction, especially in the era of large language and multimodal models and human-centric Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The Icing on the Cake. Or Is it Frosting? The Influence of Group Membership on Children's Lexical Choices.

Adults are skilled at using language to construct/negotiate identity and to signal affiliation with others, but little is known about how these abilities develop in children. Clearly, children mirror statistical patterns in their local environment (e.g., Canadian children using zed instead of zee), but do they flexibly adapt their linguistic choices on the fly in response to the choices of different peers? To address this question, we examined the effect of group membership on 7- to 9-year-olds' labeling of objects in a trivia game, exploring whether they were more likely to use a particular label (e.g., sofa vs. couch) if members of their "team" also used that label. In a preregistered study, children (N = 72) were assigned to a team (red or green) and were asked during experimental trials to answer questions-which had multiple possible answers (e.g., blackboard or chalkboard)-after hearing two teammates and two opponents respond to the same question. Results showed that children were significantly more likely to produce labels less commonly used by the community (i.e., dispreferred labels) when their teammates had produced those labels. Crucially, this effect was tied to group membership, and could not be explained by children simply repeating the most recently used label. These findings demonstrate how social processes (i.e., group membership) can guide linguistic variation in children.

Mental Health, Discourse and Stigma.

In this editorial to the special collection "Mental Health, Discourse and Stigma" we outline the concepts of mental, health, discourse and stigma as they are examined through sociolinguistic lenses. We examine the sociolinguistic approach to mental health and stigma and discuss the different theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches that have been applied in such contexts. Sociolinguistics views mental health and stigma as discursively constructed and constituted, i.e. they are both manifest, negotiated, reinforced or contested in the language that people use. We highlight existing gaps in sociolinguistic research and outline how it could enrich research in psychology and psychiatry and contribute to professional practice. Specifically, sociolinguistics provides well-established methodological tools to research the 'voices' of people with a history of mental ill health, their family, carers and mental health professionals in both online and off-line contexts. This is vital to develop targeted interventions and to contribute to de-stigmatization of mental health. To conclude, we highlight the importance of transdisciplinary research that brings together expertise in psychology, psychiatry and sociolinguistics.

El paisaje lingüístico en los baños de mujeres de la Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza - Argentina

R E S U M E N En este artículo se apunta a analizar los (micro)discursos que se encuentran en los baños públicos de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza - Argentina Se focalizan las temáticas que se abordan, la clase de diálogos que se establecen y las valoraciones que se ponen de manifiesto. Se trata de una investigación de tipo cualitativo y exploratorio. Se trabaja con un corpus de imágenes recopilado en los baños públicos de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad Nacional de Cuyo en el mes de junio de 2022.

A B S T R A C T This article aims to describe and interpret the (micro)discourses that are found in the public bathrooms of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the National University of Cuyo. In particular, the focus of this study is in the topics that are addressed, the kind of dialogues that are established and the assessments that are revealed. It is a qualitative and exploratory research. It works with a corpus of images collected in the public bathrooms of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the National University of Cuyo in the month of June 2022.

Este artigo tem como objetivo analisar os (micro)discursos encontrados nos banheiros públicos da Faculdade de Filosofia e Letras da Universidade Nacional de Cuyo. Focalizam-se os temas que são abordados, o tipo de diálogos que se estabelecem e as avaliações que se revelam. Trata-se de uma pesquisa qualitativa e exploratória. O trabalho explora um corpus de imagens coletadas nos banheiros públicos da Faculdade de Filosofia e Letras da Universidade Nacional de Cuyo no mês de junho de 2020.

Co-Occurrence, Extension, and Social Salience: The Emergence of Indexicality in an Artificial Language.

We investigated the emergence of sociolinguistic indexicality using an artificial-language-learning paradigm. Sociolinguistic indexicality involves the association of linguistic variants with nonlinguistic social or contextual features. Any linguistic variant can acquire "constellations" of such indexical meanings, though they also exhibit an ordering, with first-order indices associated with particular speaker groups and higher-order indices targeting stereotypical attributes of those speakers. Much natural-language research has been conducted on this phenomenon, but little experimental work has focused on how indexicality emerges. Here, we present three miniature artificial-language experiments designed to break ground on this question. Results show ready formation of first-order indexicality based on co-occurrence alone, with higher-order indexicality emerging as a result of extension to new speaker groups, modulated by the perceived practical importance of the indexed social feature.

Managing multilingualism in a tourist area during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Intense mobility of people and languages driven by tourism, which propels "cultural transformation of places" (Urry, 1995:2) across the world, is manifested in their linguistic landscapes through varying regimes of multilingualism. Linguistic landscapes, which render themselves for "visual consumption" (Urry, 2005), emerge from the sedimentation and synchronization of diachronic semiotic processes which index current societal developments. The recent period of the COVID-19 pandemic has had a noticeable impact on linguistic landscapes globally through the emergence of a noticeable and coherent layer of pandemic regulatory signage. In a longitudinal study covering the period between the outbreak of the pandemic in March 2020 to its decline in August 2022, we trace the implementation of regulatory measures in a highly frequented tourist region in Slovakia whereby the actors involved in the tourist industry implemented the official pandemic legislature aimed at preventing the spread of the disease. Our overall goal is to explore the management of "pandemic regulatory discourse", i.e., how producers of regulatory signage manage multimodal resources to convey their authority and stance towards regulations, to legitimize regulatory measures, and to ensure compliance with them. The study is grounded in the theoretical-methodological approaches of ethnographic linguistic landscape studies, geosemiotics, sociolinguistics of globalization, sociopragmatics, and language management theory.

How sociolinguistic factors shape children's subjective impressions of teacher quality.

When university students are asked to rate their instructors, their evaluations are often influenced by the demographic characteristics of the instructor-such as the instructor's race, gender, or language background. These influences can manifest in unfair systematic biases against particular groups of teachers and hamper movements to promote diversity in higher education. When and how do these biases develop? Here, we begin to address these questions by examining children's sociolinguistic biases against teachers who speak with different accents. To do this, we presented 5-year-old Canadian English-speaking children with pairs of adult talkers. Children were asked to select "who they'd like to be their teacher" then they rated "how good of a teacher" they thought each talker would be on a 5-point scale. In each trial, one talker spoke in the locally dominant variety of Canadian English, and the other spoke in a different accent. Children strongly preferred Canadian-accented teachers over teachers who spoke with non-native (i.e., French or Dutch) accents, but also demonstrated a preference for Canadian teachers over teachers who spoke with non-local regional accents (i.e., Australian or British). In line with the binary choice data, children rated the Canadian talkers more favourably. The relationship between the gender of the teacher and the gender of the child also impacted ratings. This work demonstrates that even at the onset of formal education, children may already exhibit signs of accent-based biases. We discuss these findings in relation to the growing literature on implicit bias in higher education.

"Black Pole" and "Asian Hole": Language Ideologies in Interracial Gay Porn.

This article examines the ideological interconnection encapsulated in the "language-race-masculinity" bundle in Asian-themed interracial gay porn produced in the United States. Reflecting on the conceptualization of "accented pornography," I propose to incorporate the theoretical constructs of interactional sociolinguistics and language ideology to expand the analytical scope and enrich the theoretical lens adopted in gay porn studies. Through analyzing the linguistic feature of English accents and language-centered practices of styling, labeling, and erasing in four selected gay porn scenes, I demonstrate how racial and masculine identities intersect and mutually constitute each other in dynamic ways. In addition, I highlight the iconic linkage between language and race that has been long neglected in gay porn studies and argue that the discursive and institutional practices of gay porn-making are dictated by the dominant ideology of White supremacy that relegates both Asian and African American communities to hierarchically lower positions in the U.S. society.

Placement educators' perspectives of international social work students' sociopragmatic communication skills.

International students who speak English as an additional language report experiencing communication issues while completing their studies and work-integrated learning placements in a range of Anglophone countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Australia. To address this issue, accreditation and registration bodies for a number of health professions, such as social work and nursing, have advocated for increasing the test score requirements for university English language entry. However, from a sociolinguistic perspective, decisions concerning ways to address communication challenges need to take into account the unique communication skills required for functioning in specific workplace settings. It is therefore essential to identify the types of communication issues occurring during work-integrated learning opportunities (e.g. placement) and to then assess whether these should be addressed by raising general English proficiency or providing structured learning opportunities for profession-specific communication development within the course content. The present study uses sociolinguistic theory to examine placement educators' perspectives on international students' communication issues using the context of social work placement. It draws on the thematic analysis of interviews with 15 placement educators in Australia. One major finding is that international students' general proficiency or ability to use specific linguistic tools (pragmalinguistic competence) is not a key area of concern for educators. The main challenge seems to involve the students' understanding of sociocultural norms underlying workplace communication (sociopragmatic competence). This finding suggests that, rather than increasing English language entry requirements, universities need to provide international students opportunities to develop their sociopragmatic competence both before and during placement. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations aimed at supporting international students who speak English as an additional language to develop their workplace communication during their studies.

You Described, We Archived: A Rich Audio Description Dataset.

The You Described, We Archived dataset (YuWA) is a collaboration between San Francisco State University and The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute. It includes audio description (AD) data collected worldwide 2013-2022 through YouDescribe, an accessibility tool for adding audio descriptions to YouTube videos. YouDescribe, a web-based audio description tool along with an iOS viewing app, has a community of 12,000+ average annual visitors, with approximately 3,000 volunteer describers, and has created over 5,500 audio described YouTube videos. Blind and visually impaired (BVI) viewers request videos, which then are saved to a wish list and volunteer audio describers select a video, write a script, record audio clips, and edit clip placement to create an audio description. The AD tracks are stored separately, posted for public view at https://youdescribe.org/ and played together with the YouTube video. The YuWA audio description data paired with the describer and viewer metadata, and collection timeline has a large number of research applications including artificial intelligence, machine learning, sociolinguistics, audio description, video understanding, video retrieval and video-language grounding tasks.

Bilingualism is always cognitively advantageous, but this doesn't mean what you think it means.

For decades now a research question has firmly established itself as a staple of psychological and neuroscientific investigations on language, namely the question of whether and how bilingualism is cognitively beneficial, detrimental or neutral. As more and more studies appear every year, it seems as though the research question itself is firmly grounded and can be answered if only we use the right experimental manipulations and subject the data to the right analysis methods and interpretive lens. In this paper we propose that, rather than merely improving prior methods in the pursuit of evidence in one direction or another, we would do well to carefully consider whether the research question itself is as firmly grounded as it might appear to be. We identify two bodies of research that suggest the research question to be highly problematic. In particular, drawing from work in sociolinguistics and in embodied cognitive science, we argue that the research question of whether bilingualism is cognitively advantageous or not is based on problematic assumptions about language and cognition. Once these assumptions are addressed head on, a straightforward answer to the question arises, but the question itself comes to seem to be a poor starting point for research. After examining why this is so, we conclude by exploring some implications for future research.

Sociolectal and Dialectal Variation in Prosody.

As in many linguistics subfields, studies of prosody have mainly focused on majority languages and dialects and on speakers who hold power in social structures. The goal of this Special Issue is to diversify prosody research in terms of the languages and dialects being investigated, as well as the social structures that influence prosodic variation. The Special Issue brings together prosody researchers and researchers exploring sociological variation in prosody, with a focus on the prosody of marginalized dialects and on prosodic differences based on gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. The papers in this volume don't just advance our understanding of critical issues in sociolinguistics, but they also challenge some of the received wisdom in the exploration of sociolinguistic influences on prosody. Not only does this collection highlight the value of this work to informing theories of prosodic variation and change, but the collected papers also provide examples of methodological innovations in the field that will be valuable for all prosody researchers.

Rhoticity in English, a Journey Over Time Through Social Class: A Narrative Review.

Rhoticity in English refers to the pronunciation of the consonant /r/ in all r position contexts, while non-rhoticity refers to the dropping of the /r/ sound in particular r positions. In this context, the two English varieties, classified as rhotic and non-rhotic can be found both in British and American English-speaking people, but also in other English-speaking countries. The most updated information about rhoticity, related history of classes in the English-speaking people have been retrieved from the most important database such as ScienceDirect and Scopus. Society and language are strictly related, especially in rhoticity changes that occurred over time in the English-speaking people. In fact, rhoticity is a dynamic sociolinguistic phenomenon as it was influenced by social class changes during centuries, and even now it is constantly evolving. Rhoticity is also connected to social mobility in English-speaking countries and is also an indicator of social displacement from one social class to another. In fact, class, language, and social differentiation are only the terms of an inseparable social equation. In conclusion, in the dynamics of class, rhoticity and non-rhoticity seem are related to socio-anthropological issues that confirm an intimate connection with the process of social differentiation.

Let's talk about it: Reframing communication in medical teams.

Communication is associated with a significant percentage of errors or omissions in secondary healthcare across specialities; it is also the core process in and through which medical teams manage tasks, establish a rhythm and relationship between themselves and the patient, all of which are critical components of clinical practice. Despite this, however, communication is framed in medical training and the literature in either narrow terms or in a broad and fuzzy way, and it is indicative of the issue that teamwork and team communication are perceived and treated separately. In this paper, we draw on completed and ongoing interdisciplinary work to show how teams interact through illustrative examples from a large project on the management of obstetric emergencies. We provide a brief overview of the limitations in current tools and approaches, and we show how research under disciplines that have a long tradition in the analysis of interaction, and particularly healthcare sociolinguistics, can be translated and make a solid contribution to medical research and training.

20-month-olds selectively generalize newly learned word meanings based on cues to linguistic community membership.

A growing body of work suggests that speaker-race influences how infants and toddlers interpret the meanings of words. In two experiments, we explored the role of speaker-race on whether newly learned word-object pairs are generalized to new speakers. Seventy-two 20-month-olds were taught two word-object pairs from a familiar race speaker, and two different word-object pairs from an unfamiliar race speaker (four new pairs total). Using an intermodal preferential looking procedure, their interpretation of these new word-object pairs was tested using an unpictured novel speaker. We found that toddlers did not generalize word meanings taught by an unfamiliar race speaker to a new speaker (Experiment 1), unless given evidence that the unfamiliar race speaker was a member of the child's linguistic community through affiliative behaviour and linguistic competence (Experiment 2). In both experiments, generalization was observed for the word-object pairs taught by the familiar race speaker. These experiments indicate that children attend to speakers' non-linguistic properties, and this, in turn, can influence the perceived relevance of speakers' labels.

The Trini Sing-Song: Sociophonetic variation in Trinidadian English prosody and differences to other varieties.

The current study provides a phonetic perspective on the questions of whether a high degree of variability in pitch may be considered a characteristic, endonormative feature of Trinidadian English (TrinE) at the level of speech production and contribute to what is popularly described as 'sing-song' prosody. Based on read and spontaneous data from 111 speakers, we analyze pitch level, range, and dynamism in TrinE in comparison to Southern Standard British (BrE) and Educated Indian English (IndE) and investigate sociophonetic variation in TrinE prosody with a view to these global F0 parameters. Our findings suggest that a large pitch range could potentially be considered an endonormative feature of TrinE that distinguishes it from other varieties (BrE and IndE), at least in spontaneous speech. More importantly, however, it is shown that a high degree of pitch variation in terms of range and dynamism is not as much characteristic of TrinE as a whole as it is of female Trinidadian speakers. An important finding of this study is that pitch variation patterns are not homogenous in TrinE, but systematically sociolinguistically conditioned across gender, age, and ethnic groups, and rural and urban speakers. The findings thus reveal that there is a considerable degree of systematic local differentiation in TrinE prosody. On a more general level, the findings may be taken to indicate that endonormative tendencies and sociolinguistic differentiation in TrinE prosody are interlinked.

Perceiving gender while perceiving language: Integrating psycholinguistics and gender theory.

There is a substantial body of literature showing that men and women speak differently and that these differences are endemic to the speech signal. However, the psycholinguistic mechanisms underlying the integration of social category perception and language are still poorly understood. Speaker attributes such as emotional state, age, sex, and race have often been treated in the literature as dissociable, but perceptual systems for social categories demonstrably rely on interdependent cognitive processes. We introduce a diversity science framework for evaluating the existing literature on gender and speech perception, arguing that differences in beliefs about gender may be defined as differences in beliefs about differences. Treating individual, group, and societal level contrasts in ideological patterns as phenomenologically distinctive, we enumerate six ideological arenas which define claims about gender and examine the literature for treatment of these issues. We argue that both participants and investigators predictably show evidence of differences in ideological attitudes toward the normative definition of persons. The influence of social knowledge on linguistic perception therefore occurs in the context of predictable variation in both attention and inattention to people and the distinguishing features which mark them salient as kinds. We link experiences of visibility, invisibility, and hypervisibility with ideological variation regarding the significance of physiological, linguistic, and social features, concluding that gender ideologies are implicated both in linguistic processing and in social judgments of value between groups. We conclude with a summary of the key gaps in the current literature and recommendations for best practices studies that may use in future investigations of socially meaningful variation in speech perception. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language in Mind and Brain Psychology > Language Linguistics > Language Acquisition Psychology > Perception and Psychophysics.

"I don't Think These Devices are Very Culturally Sensitive."-Impact of Automated Speech Recognition Errors on African Americans.

Automated speech recognition (ASR) converts language into text and is used across a variety of applications to assist us in everyday life, from powering virtual assistants, natural language conversations, to enabling dictation services. While recent work suggests that there are racial disparities in the performance of ASR systems for speakers of African American Vernacular English, little is known about the psychological and experiential effects of these failures paper provides a detailed examination of the behavioral and psychological consequences of ASR voice errors and the difficulty African American users have with getting their intents recognized. The results demonstrate that ASR failures have a negative, detrimental impact on African American users. Specifically, African Americans feel othered when using technology powered by ASR-errors surface thoughts about identity, namely about race and geographic location-leaving them feeling that the technology was not made for them. As a result, African Americans accommodate their speech to have better success with the technology. We incorporate the insights and lessons learned from sociolinguistics in our suggestions for linguistically responsive ways to build more inclusive voice systems that consider African American users' needs, attitudes, and speech patterns. Our findings suggest that the use of a diary study can enable researchers to best understand the experiences and needs of communities who are often misunderstood by ASR. We argue this methodological framework could enable researchers who are concerned with fairness in AI to better capture the needs of all speakers who are traditionally misheard by voice-activated, artificially intelligent (voice-AI) digital systems.