Also, new words and phrases are used in spoken or informal language sooner than in formal, written language, so it's true that the phrases you may hear a teenager use may not yet be appropriate for business letters. But that doesn't mean they're worse - just newer. For years, English teachers and newspaper editors argued that the word hopefully shouldn't be used to mean 'I hope', as in hopefully it won't rain today , even though people frequently used it that way in informal speech.
Of course nobody complained about other 'sentence adverbs' such as frankly and actually. The battle against hopefully is now all but lost, and it appears at the beginnings of sentences, even in formal documents.
If you listen carefully, you can hear language change in progress. For example, anymore is a word that used to only occur in negative sentences, such as I don't eat pizza anymore.
Now, in many areas of the country, it's being used in positive sentences, like I've been eating a lot of pizza anymore. In this use, anymore means something like 'lately'. If that sounds odd to you now, keep listening; you may be hearing it in your neighborhood before long. By 'correct English', people usually mean Standard English. Most languages have a standard form; it's the form of the language used in government, education, and other formal contexts. But Standard English is actually just one dialect of English.
What's important to realize is that there's no such thing as a 'sloppy' or 'lazy' dialect. Every dialect of every language has rules - not 'schoolroom' rules, like 'don't split your infinitives', but rather the sorts of rules that tell us that the cat slept is a sentence of English, but slept cat the isn't.
These rules tell us what language is like rather than what it should be like. Sentence l follows the rules of Standard English; sentence 2 follows a set of rules present in several other dialects.
Neither is sloppier than the other, they just differ in the rule for making a negative sentence. In l , dinner is marked as negative with any ; in 2 , it's marked as negative with no. The rules are different, but neither is more logical or elegant than the other. In fact, Old English regularly used 'double negatives', parallel to what we see in 2.
Many modern languages, including Italian and Spanish, either allow or require more than one negative word in a sentence. Sentences like 2 only sound 'bad' if you didn't happen to grow up speaking a dialect that uses them.
This is said to be 'ungrammatical' because thoroughly splits the infinitive to water. Why are split infinitives so bad? Here's why: seventeenth-century grammarians believed Latin was the ideal language, so they thought English should be as much like Latin as possible. In Latin, an infinitive like to water is a single word; it's impossible to split it up. So today, years later, we're still being taught that sentences like 3 are wrong, all because someone in the 's thought English should be more like Latin.
Here's one last example. Over the past few decades, three new ways of reporting speech have appeared:. In 4 , goes means pretty much the same thing as said ; it's used for reporting Karen's actual words. In 5 , is like means the speaker is telling us more or less what Karen said.
If Karen had used different words for the same basic idea, 5 would be appropriate, but 4 would not. Cutting edge technology is helping researchers track eye movement and brain activity to the millisecond in a bid to understand how we process language and extract meaning from what we see, read and hear.
As a discipline, psycholinguistics traces its history back to the early 20 th century debate about acquired and innate behaviours. That distinction between the two was developed in the s and s by psychologists such as BF Skinner, who argued that all language must be learned, and the philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky, who believed that humans possess an innate language facility.
Modern psycholinguists focus on various aspects of language, for example how children and adults learn language acquisition and language learning , how language develops from an initial idea to the spoken or written word production , and the processes by which a wide variety of language users understand language comprehension.
She is particularly interested in how context — especially visual context — contributes to language processing. She focuses in particular on research into prediction in language comprehension; that is, how we can begin to understand and predict meaning before we actually encounter a specific word. The development of technologies has further enabled the study of brain activity while people perform various tasks. Among the most notable findings for linguistics has been the discovery of event-related brain potentials — brain responses to words and other stimuli.
Our immediate environment can affect language comprehension in real time. Language in context Dr Knoeferle looks at what the research literature says about context-focused approaches to comprehension. Studies have looked at verification and the interaction between listening and looking, for example asking subjects to verify a sentence in the context of a picture.
Language comprehension Following her extensive study of the literature, Dr Knoeferle identifies three key processes and associated mechanisms in language comprehension. Her paper discusses these processes at length in light of extant academic research. Dr Knoeferle argues that research approaches to date suggest that more attention should be paid to the potential differences between individuals. She draws three conclusions. These concern the link between context effects and comprehender characteristics, the situation and environment in which language arises, and the comprehension process.
Context is important in language comprehension, but context effects are variable, and some are more robust than others. Such context effects vary by our characteristics as language users, how words relate to the environment and what comprehension process they contribute to. Age particularly affects how quickly individuals integrate context into comprehension. The research literature suggests that a visually depicted action affects comprehension more rapidly in young adults than it does with kindergarten children, or with adults aged over You will not use all of the boxes.
After completing the memory task, participants filled out the post-experiment language and demographic questionnaire. If the drawing could be exclusively matched to a single drawing in the target list even if some minor details were missing , the participants received credit for that drawing; however, if the drawing could not be matched to any drawings, could be matched to multiple drawings, or could be matched to a drawing in a non-target list, the participant did not receive credit.
All other information and stimuli will be willingly provided by the author. To assess the first hypothesis i. These data are displayed in Figure 3 below. As can be seen in Figure 3 , the mean percentage of shapes recalled for the English-Spanish Bilinguals was not higher when there was a change in language context within an event i. Thus, by visual inspection, the data clearly do not support the hypothesis that a change in language context within an event helps visual memory in bilinguals.
Figure 3. Visual memory performance when there was and was not a change in language context within an event.
This image displays visual memory performance percentage of shapes recalled for English-Spanish Bilinguals and Controls when there was a change in language context within an event English-Spanish Context and when there was no change in language context within an event English-Only Context and Spanish-Only Context.
Two statistical tests were conducted to assess the first hypothesis: a traditional ANOVA and a generalized linear mixed-effects model. English-Only Context vs. Controls as a between-subjects independent variable, and mean percentage of shapes recalled as the dependent variable. The significant main effect of Group reflects an advantage for the English-Spanish Bilinguals, but this advantage seems to be due mostly to enhanced performance when there was no change in language context within an event, which goes against the hypothesis.
A generalized linear mixed-effects model yielded similar results. The model consisted of Group and Language Context as fixed effects and Participant as a random effect on the intercept. The model was computed using the glmer function in R, with the fixed effects sum coded, and with significance assessed through an Analysis of Deviance Table Type III Wald chi-square tests.
To assess the second hypothesis i. These data are shown in Figure 4 below. A visual inspection of Figure 4 reveals a consistent decline in recall for the Controls from List 1 to List 2 to List 3, i. For the English-Spanish Bilinguals, however, the decline is less consistent, with List 3 showing the opposite of proactive interference and resulting in a noticeable difference between the English-Spanish Bilinguals and Controls.
These visual impressions are partially consistent with the second hypothesis. Figure 4. Visual memory performance when there was and was not a change in language context between events. This image displays visual memory performance for English-Spanish Bilinguals top line and Controls bottom line when there was no between-event language context change i.
The mean percentage of shapes recalled for the three language contexts English-Only, Spanish-Only, and English-Spanish are displayed at the bottom. As with the first hypothesis, two statistical tests i. List 2 vs. List 3 as a within-subjects independent variable, Group English-Spanish Bilinguals vs. To follow up the interaction, Bonferroni-corrected t -test comparisons among lists i.
List 2, List 1 vs. List 3, and List 2 vs. List 3 were conducted for both English-Spanish Bilinguals and Controls. The only comparison that survived correction for multiple comparisons was List 1 vs. The decline for the Controls in List 3, in conjunction with a reversal pattern for English-Spanish Bilinguals, appeared to create a sizable difference between groups in List 3 but not Lists 1 and 2.
Next, a generalized linear mixed-effects model was conducted, with Group and List Number as fixed effects and Participant as a random effect on the intercept. The generalized linear mixed-effects model allows us to determine if the crucial interaction between Group and List Number could be replicated with a different type of analysis and with an analysis that accounts for the random effect of participants. The model was computed using the glmer function in R.
Analyses were then conducted in order to rule out alternative explanations for the finding of superior recall for English-Spanish Bilinguals relative to Controls on List 3 resulting from a lack of proactive interference.
It seemed possible that the high recall was due, not to the English-Spanish bilingualism per se , but either to: 1 bilingualism more generally; or 2 by chance to the order in which groups completed the lists given the atypical group assignment process.
The second alternative explanation was also excluded as a likely possibility, as a log-linear analysis of a 3-way contingency table of Group English-Spanish Bilinguals vs. Spanish-Only Context vs. In other words, despite the atypical group assignment process, the two groups were exposed to the language contexts in a similar order.
In a final, exploratory analysis, a potential effect of the initial language context i. Spanish on subsequent memory performance was assessed. The English-starters had a mean recall percentage of Thus, numerically, the Spanish-starters performed better than the English-starters on the English-Spanish context. However, the interaction between Group English-starters vs. Spanish-starters and Language Context single-language context vs.
With research on event processing as a guiding theoretical framework, the current study served as a preliminary examination into how changes in the ambient linguistic environment might influence visual memory in bilinguals. In partial support of hypothesis 2, the control participants had a consistent downward recall trajectory from the first list to the second list to the third list i.
Although the results are consistent with hypothesis 2 i. Why did the benefit emerge only on the third list? A plausible explanation is that by the onset of the third list, participants had been exposed to two different language contexts, thereby making it clear that the language context changes from list to list and could thus be used to differentiate lists.
At the onset of the second list, with exposure to only one list-wide language context, participants did not know that language context would be varied across lists and that it could be used as a distinguishing element to reduce interference.
Notably, the memory benefit on the third list for the English-Spanish bilinguals appears to have been driven more by the single-language contexts i. Why is this the case?
It could be due to the single-language contexts being more distinct from the previous lists. The single-language contexts only share contextual commonalities with one of the previous lists, whereas the dual-language context shares contextual commonalities with both of the previous lists. With more dissimilarity, there is potentially less competition and better memory.
A related explanation invokes language-dependent memory Marian and Neisser, ; Marian and Fausey, ; Marian and Kaushanskaya, , a phenomenon whereby a language context evokes memories that were encoded in that same language context.
In the current paradigm, the single-language contexts would only cue memories of a subset of the previously encoded shapes, whereas a dual-language context would cue memories of all previously encoded shapes, potentially creating more interference. While there was support for the second hypothesis, there was no support for the first hypothesis.
Why did the results fail to support the first hypothesis? That is, why did a within-event language context change not increase memory performance? One possibility is that this benefit is restricted to high proficiency and high use bilinguals. Spanish proficiency was low as was current Spanish use for many of the English-Spanish bilinguals in the current study, as can be gleaned from the Spanish proficiency and Spanish use mean and standard deviation in Table 1.
However, an exploratory correlation analysis reveals no link between Spanish proficiency and recall performance in the English-Spanish Context i. Nevertheless, a follow-up study with high proficiency and high use bilinguals is warranted. A second possibility is that, while proficiency may not be especially relevant, code-switching behavior may be, and the potential memory enhancement from a within-event language switch may be restricted to bilinguals who code-switch frequently. A third possibility is that bilinguals incurred a cognitive processing cost when a within-event language switch occurred; that is, bilinguals may have deployed cognitive control resources to suppress the previous language Philipp and Huestegge, ; Olson, ; but see Declerck et al.
A fourth possibility relates to the strength of the language context; perhaps the ambient linguistic context needs to be stronger and may even need to include expressive language in addition to receptive language. A fifth and final possibility is that there is a benefit to a within-event language switch, but that it was masked by a potential benefit of the single-language English-Only and Spanish-Only contexts. In other words, a consistent and meaningful context in the form of a single-language context may have aided encoding, which concealed a benefit that may also be derived from a language switch.
As this list shows, there are many possibilities for why a within-event language context change effect did not manifest in the current paradigm, rendering this study preliminary and warranting additional studies.
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