The Influence of Emotion and Culture on Language Representation and Processing

Predicting pragmatic functions of Chinese echo questions using prosody: evidence from acoustic analysis and data modeling

Echo questions serve two pragmatic functions (recapitulatory and explicatory) and are subdivided into two types (yes-no echo question and wh-echo question) in verbal communication. Yet to date, most relevant studies have been conducted in European languages like English and Spanish. It remains unknown whether the different functions of echo questions can be conveyed via prosody in spoken Chinese. Additionally, no comparison was made on the diversified algorithmic models in predicting functions by the prosodity of Chinese echo questions, a novel linguistic cognition in nature. This motivated us to use different acoustic cues to predict different pragmatic functions of Chinese echo questions by virtue of acoustic experiment and data modeling. The results showed that for yes-no echo question, explicatory function exhibited higher pitch and intensity patterns than recapitulatory function whereas for wh-echo question, recapitulatory function demonstrated higher pitch and intensity patterns than explicatory function. With regard to data modeling, the algorithm Support Vector Machine (SVM) relative to Random Forest (RF) and Logistic Regression (LR) performed better when predicting different functions using prosodic cues in both yes-no and wh-echo questions. This study from a digitized perspective adds evidence to the cognition of echo questions' functions on a prosodic basis.

The embodiment of emotion-label words and emotion-laden words: Evidence from late Chinese-English bilinguals

Although increasing studies have confirmed the distinction between emotion-label words (words directly label emotional states) and emotion-laden words (words evoke emotions through connotations), the existing evidence is inconclusive, and their embodiment is unknown. In the current study, the emotional categorization task was adopted to investigate whether these two types of emotion words are embodied by directly comparing how they are processed in individuals' native language (L1) and the second language (L2) among late Chinese-English bilinguals. The results revealed that apart from L2 negative emotion-laden words, both types of emotion words in L1 and L2 produced significant emotion effects, with faster response times and/or higher accuracy rates. In addition, processing facilitation for emotion-label words over emotion-laden words was observed irrespective of language operation; a significant three-way interaction between the language, valence and emotion word type was noted. Taken together, this study suggested that the embodiment of emotion words is modulated by the emotion word type, and L2 negative emotion-laden words tend to be affectively disembodied. The disassociation between emotion-label and emotion-laden words is confirmed in both L1 and L2 and therefore, future emotion word research should take the emotion word type into account.

Personality and Word Use: Study on Czech Language and the Big Five

The study is a follow-up to three published anglophone researches examining the relation between the use of linguistic categories and personality characteristics as outlined in the Big Five model, with the purpose of replicating these and elaborating for the Czech language. The comparative research study in Czech focuses on analysis of both grammatical and semantic variables in six types of text (written and oral), produced by N = 200 participants. Within the study, there were six confirmed relations, however, these appear only in certain types of text. The results show not only an essential role of the text register, but they also allow us to evaluate the universality of findings of studies in English in comparison with other, especially Slavic, languages.

Beyond English: Considering Language and Culture in Psychological Text Analysis

The paper discusses the role of language and culture in the context of quantitative text analysis in psychological research. It reviews current automatic text analysis methods and approaches from the perspective of the unique challenges that can arise when going beyond the default English language. Special attention is paid to closed-vocabulary approaches and related methods (and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count in particular), both from the perspective of cross-cultural research where the analytic process inherently consists of comparing phenomena across cultures and languages and the perspective of generalizability beyond the language and the cultural focus of the original investigation. We highlight the need for a more universal and flexible theoretical and methodological grounding of current research, which includes the linguistic, cultural, and situational specifics of communication, and we provide suggestions for procedures that can be implemented in future studies and facilitate psychological text analysis across languages and cultures.

Emotion Words Modulate Early Conflict Processing in a Flanker Task: Differentiating Emotion-Label Words and Emotion-Laden Words in Second Language

Emotion words modulate conflict processing, even at an early stage (i.e., N200). However, the previous studies implicitly mixed emotion-label words and emotion-laden words together and mostly concentrated on first language (L1) rather than on second language (L2). The current study aimed to investigate whether L2 negative emotion-label words, negative emotion-laden words, and neutral words would affect conflict processing in a flanker task by using event-related potential (ERP) measurements. Twenty Chinese-English bilinguals completed a modified flanker task to decide the color of the target words. The results revealed that only L2 negative emotion-label words elicited larger left frontal N200 in the incongruent condition than in the congruent condition. No significant difference between the two conditions was observed for L2 negative emotion-laden words or neutral words. This research demonstrated that L2 emotion words could also modulate early conflict processing, at least for L2 negative emotion-label words.