Experimental Approaches to Socio‐Linguistics: Usage and Interpretation of Non‐Verbal and Verbal Expressions in Cross‐ Cultural Communication

Abstract

Social context shapes our behavior in interpersonal communication. In this chapter, I will address how experimental psychology contributes to the study of socio-linguistic processes, focusing on nonverbal and verbal processing in a cross-cultural or crosslinguistic communicative setting. A systematic review of the most up-to-date empirical studies will show: 1) the culturally-universal and culturally-specific encoding of emotion in speech. The acoustic cues that are commonly involved in discriminating basic emotions in vocal expressions across languages and the cross-linguistic variations in such encoding will be demonstrated; 2) the modulation of in-group and outgroup status (e.g. inferred from speaker's dialect, familiarity towards a language) on the encoding and decoding of speaker's meaning; 3) the impact of cultural orientation and cultural learning on the interpretation of social and affective meaning, focusing on how immigration process shapes one's language use and comprehension. I will highlight the significance of combining the research paradigms from experimental psychology with cognitive (neuro)science methodologies such as electrophysiological recording and functional magnetic resonance imaging, to address the relevant questions in crosscultural communicative settings. The chapter is concluded by a future direction to study the socio-cultural bases of language and linguistic underpinnings of cultural behaviour.

Predicting confidence and doubt in accented speakers: Human perception and machine learning experiments

“…However, while durational feature contributed to a larger extent in the native accent, the mean and range of speech intensity contributed more in the foreign and regional accent in differentiating the confidence and doubt. These findings highlight computational mechanisms underlying inter-cultural/group confidence perception in speech communication and lend support to the dialect theory of vocal expression recognition [17][18][19][20][21].…”

Prefrontal Cortex: Role in Language Communication during Social Interaction

“…One future perspective is to examine the functional coupling between prefrontal regions and other parts of the brain that support the social inference via linguistic cues (e.g., vocal cues [100]) and the individual differences that modulate the strength of the functional coupling. Despite growing recent evidence with behavioral measures showing that language communication is deeply grounded in sociocultural conventions [84], few neuroimaging studies have dedicated to how culturally related linguistic and speech cues (e.g., linguistic accent) can contribute to the understanding of the role of the medial prefrontal cortex in perceiving sociocultural groups [100]. Another related question is how the knowledge regarding prefrontal cortex can illuminate the neural underpinnings of the socio-communicative deficits in special populations such as autism and schizophrenia, with a particular interest in the various types of pragmatic and social language processing as the medium for indexing their social interactive ability.…”

Trends in Usage-Based and Pragmatic Language Processing and Learning: A Bibliometric Analysis on Psycholinguistics and Second-Language Acquisition Studies

“…The capacity of classifying communicative categories in one's second language with the model built in one's mother tongue, and the vice versa, is promising to reveal if the mental representation underlying pragmatic functions is shared or distinct between L1 and L2. Other fascinating lines of research are to enhance the understanding of the individual differences in the processing of pragmatic language that is endorsed by professional, political, or cultural background of the language users [21,22], and the atypical processing that may be revealed by testing individuals with pragmatic impairments or variations (including but not limited to neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disordered individuals). With the aid of multimodal approaches to build intelligent recognition system, the profiling for one's pragmatic language ability is likely to provide a novel way to predict or diagnose individuals with special clinical status [23].…”