Volume 26 (2022): Issue 1 (January 2022)

This study investigated the influence of loci of content and function words on stuttering frequency in the speech of Arabic children who stutter. Participants were 85 children who stutter (24 preschool, 61 school age). The preschool children who stutter were 17 males and 7 females with a mean age of 4.58 ± 0.50 (range: 4-5 years old). The school age children who stutter were 56 males and 5 females with a mean age of 10.64 ± 2.76 (range: 6-16 years old). No significant difference was found between the preschool and school age children who stutter in the mean percentage of stuttering on both content and function words. For school age children who stutter, results showed a significantly higher percentage of stuttering on function words compared to content words in the mild level of stuttering (p = .010). Taking severity as a continuous variable, results indicated a significant positive correlation between scores on the Stuttering Severity Instrument-4 (SSI-4) and loci of stuttering on both content and function words. The results also revealed a significant negative correlation between age (as a continuous variable) and loci of stuttering in the category of function words. The findings of the current study provide new information about the impact of word type (function vs. content words) on stuttering in Arabic-speaking children.

Gender bias continues to be an ongoing issue in the field of medicine. While bias may come in many forms, patients’ biases and perceptions have been understudied and may impact adherence to treatment, leading to unequal outcomes. Online reviews for doctors are a naturalistic way to study gender bias. In this study, we leveraged the LIWC psychological linguistic analysis tool to analyze the language styles of ZocDoc and RateMDs reviews and understand the potential role of gender in patients’ perceptions of their doctors. Mean differences were calculated using bootstrapped hierarchical linear modeling. We found that reviews for female physicians are generally more informal and emotional than those for male physicians. While our study was exploratory, the results suggest that both patients and physicians need to increase their awareness of how their biases may be affecting how they give and receive vital health information.

Drawing on the feminist poststructuralist perspective, the current study explored the usernames adopted by female users of Ninisite, that is, a Persian discussion forum, and aimed at identifying their identity markers. To this end, a corpus of 947 usernames in Ninisite was compiled. Using thematic analysis, the recurrent themes in the usernames were pinpointed, which led to the identification of six themes as identity markers, namely, gender, religion/ideology, ethnicity, occupation/profession, being humorous, and sense of uniqueness. With regard to the socioculturally unique context of Iran, a continuum of specificity versus generality can be observed in the usernames on Ninisite, with specificity emphasizing differences, sense of uniqueness, and individualization of the users, and generality highlighting neutrality, commonalities, and conventionality.

This paper reports the results of an experimental study with a between subject design (N = 122) whose aim was to compare irony comprehension rates in face-to-face (FTF) and computer-mediated communication (CMC), and examine the influence of paraverbal irony signals on irony identification rates. An irony comprehension test was intersemiotically translated to three conditions: FTF (n = 46), paraverbal signal-rich CMC (n = 30), and paraverbal signal-poor CMC (n = 46). The study adopted a relevance theoretic account of irony. There was a statistically significant difference between the signal-rich CMC and FTF conditions - irony identification rates were higher in the signal-rich CMC condition. The results are important since they suggest that paraverbal irony signals are not essential for correct irony identification if relevant contextual information is available, and the CMC medium is not only unlikely to be an obstacle in communicating the ironic intent, but with the addition of the medium-specific irony signals, may be significantly better.

Typing is a ubiquitous daily action for many individuals; yet, research on how these actions have changed our perception of language is limited. One such influence, deemed the QWERTY effect, is an increase in valence ratings for words typed more with the right hand on a traditional keyboard (Jasmin & Casasanto, 2012). Although this finding is intuitively appealing given both right-handed dominance and the smaller number of letters typed with the right hand, an extension and replication of the right-side advantage is warranted. The present paper re-examined the QWERTY effect expanding to other embodied cognition variables (Barsalou, 1999). First, we found that the right-side advantage is replicable to new valence stimuli. Further, when examining expertise, right-side advantage interacted with typing speed and typeability (i.e., alternating hand key presses or finger switches), portraying that both skill and procedural actions play a role in judgment of valence on words.

This study aimed to understand the impact of the prosodic deficit in Parkinson’s disease (PD) on the communicative effectiveness of vocal expression of emotion. Fourteen patients with PD and 13 healthy control subjects (HC) uttered the phrase “non è possible, non ora” (“It is not possible, not now”) six times reading different emotional narrations. Three experts evaluated the PD subjects’ vocal production in terms of their communicative effectiveness. The PD patients were divided into two groups: PD+ (with residual effectiveness) and PD− (with impaired effectiveness). The vocal productions were administered to 30 naïve listeners. They were requested to label the emotion they recognized and to make judgments about their communicative effectiveness. The PD speakers were perceived as less effective than the HC speakers in conveying emotions (especially fear and anger). The PD− group was the most impaired in the expression of emotion, suggesting that speech disorders impact differently at the same stage of the disease with varying degrees of severity.

The current study aimed to investigate age-related differences in narrative abilities at the macrostructural and microstructural levels and to examine which microstructural aspects explain narrative macrostructure at ages six and eight. Oral narratives were elicited from 89 Croatian monolingual children using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). At the microstructural level, the measure of lexical diversity D, clausal density, and mean length of clause were assessed. Macrostructure was assessed using the standardized MAIN scoring procedure. We found differences between the two age groups in lexical diversity, clausal density, and macrostructure, with eight-year-olds scoring higher on all measures. Variance in the macrostructure was explained to a significant extent by lexical diversity in the case of six-year-olds, and by both lexical diversity and clausal density in the case of eight-year-olds. Our results suggest that six-year-olds rely mostly on lexical abilities when telling a story, while eight-year-olds also draw on syntactic abilities.

While solving tasks that test their intelligence, children suffering from developmental language disorders (DLD) usually receive lower scores than their typically developing (TD) peers. The present study aimed to assess how children with DLD solve typical nonverbal tasks. Sixty-five children (ages 6-9 years), monolingual users of the Polish language, participated in this study (34 with DLD, 31 TD). The Test of Language Development (TLD) was used to assess language development. Three tasks from the ABC II Kaufmann were used: triangles, story completion, and conceptual thinking. Children with DLD scored significantly lower than TD children in conceptual thinking and story completion. Scores on the triangles test did not correlate significantly with scores on the linguistic tests, whereas conceptual thinking and story completion were highly intercorrelated. While solving the task that required choosing an object that does not match other objects, children with DLD frequently selected different answers than TD children.

YouTube is a popular social media platform that fosters the development of social bonds between viewers and YouTubers called parasocial relationships (PSR). These relationships might be associated with both viewer characteristics, such as social anxiety, and YouTuber video characteristics, such as self-disclosure. Additionally, PSR might be associated with the level of addiction to the platform. Data from 370 college students were extracted from a previous study and 360 videos of 72 YouTubers were coded to (a) explore the different dimensions of PSR and (b) examine a mediation model of YouTube addiction. The results support the existence of three PSR dimensions. The results also showed that PSR dimensions were associated with both viewers’ social anxiety and YouTubers’ evaluative self-disclosure. One PSR dimension was positively associated with YouTube addiction. This study encourages the development of qualitative studies to more precisely identify the different facets of PSR with social media figures.

This study explored the linguistic patterns and discourse on suicide of the Swedish artist Avicii. Focusing on key events in his life, career, and compositions, a triangulation of data sources was employed grounded on psychobiographical research framework and corpus-based discourse analysis. Texts with reference to suicidal risk factors were then evaluated based on the interpersonal-psychological theory of suicide to establish linguistic representations of emotional distress and suicidal ideation. The findings suggest that lexical features associated with mental health struggles, that is, high volume of first-person deixis and death-themed linguistic references, were evident in his writing. There were substantial implications of his predisposition to mental stress and his call for help, his S.O.S. This study helps in further understanding the language and discourse of artists like Avicii on the immense dislocation of emotions and the complexities of navigating (inter)personal relationships.

Narrative ability is an important life-skill and mature narrators do not only provide information about actions and events when telling a story but also include the motivations, emotions and beliefs experienced by protagonists. It is rare for young children to spontaneously explain the beliefs of story characters but the reasons are unclear. In the current study, frog story data from 143 Swedish children aged 4–6 showed that children’s level of explicitness in conveying a fictional false belief was associated with referential narrative ability and use of mental vocabulary, but not to the ability to formulate embedded propositions. Socioeconomic status predicted level of explicitness, whereas no associations were found to age, sex or being multilingual. Future work should examine narrative practices in preschool and in the home more closely, enabling improved support to provide children with equal opportunities.

The present study takes a self-determination theory perspective (Ryan & Deci, 2017) to explore the connections linking advising in language learning and basic psychological need satisfaction, and ways participation in advising can enhance learner well-being and flourishing. This study addresses a gap in research into advising by focusing on its role as psychological support for the language learner. The study adopts a concurrent triangulation mixed-methods approach to explore the advising experience of 96 Japanese language learners using an adapted version of the basic psychological needs satisfaction and frustration questionnaire (BPNSF; Chen et al., 2015) alongside an interpretative analysis of learner self-reports. The quantitative results show advising perceived as need-supportive, while the qualitative analysis identified examples of autonomous functioning, personal growth, and caring relationships as antecedents of need satisfaction. Together the findings suggest advising has an important role in supporting language learners in ways that underpin flourishing and enhance learner well-being.

During the postpartum period, women experience neurobiological and psychosocial variations that impact language functioning. Word production in verbal fluency tasks (VFTs) is a cognitive indicator of associative (semantic categorization and phonological analysis) and executive (inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility) processes. Also, a linguistic analysis allows for understanding production strategies (e.g., orthographic and use of rhymes), with multivariate statistics facilitating cluster identification of the most common words. Considering these approaches, this study aimed to optimize semantic and phonological VFT analysis for the identification of postpartum women’s mental lexicon using quantitative and qualitative scores. These outcomes were evaluated together with sociodemographic and reproductive data of 100 postpartum women (from Argentina). Mental lexicon description was statistically improved and showed that multiparous women clustered words more concisely than primiparous women, with increased correct words and better organizational strategies. In sum, female reproductive history improved VFT outcomes. The current results also show that factor analysis can optimize the neuropsychological study of language structuring.

Sequences of two modal verbs in spoken English can represent use of a nonstandard syntactic feature (double modal) or a corrected utterance in which a speaker begins with one modal auxiliary, but switches to another (self-repair). This article presents the Double Modals and Self-Repairs (DMSR) database, a table of naturalistic double modals and self-repairs in videos from local government entities in North America, created from the Corpus of North American Spoken English (CoNASE). The paper describes the procedures used for the database’s creation, discusses potential uses, and presents an exploratory analysis in which a logistic regression classifier is trained with CoNASE data to distinguish authentic double modals from self-repair sequences on the basis of local discourse context. The analysis demonstrates how large corpora of speech can be used to investigate the links between syntactic and pragmatic phenomena and shows specifically that double modals are an interactive device, while two-modal sequences as self-repairs may be the result of high cognitive load. The paper concludes with a discussion of multimodal corpus creation from YouTube for the study of lexical, syntactic, and interactional phenomena in speech as well as for the analysis of complex, multilevel computer-mediated communication (CMC) phenomena.

The main objective of this study was to examine the specialized environmental vocabulary which is incorporated in ordinary discourse found on the Internet. Specifically, we collected English-language data from two social networks, Twitter and Reddit, with a set of environmental keywords which was compiled using the term candidates extraction technique described in Shvets and Wanner (2020). Furthermore, using data from the initial corpus, we built a smaller sample of texts to serve as a ground for a preliminary linguistic analysis of the environmental term carbon. In environmental discourse, carbon is an umbrella term which has acquired multiple senses when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, this term has settled in ordinary communication (Fletcher & Downing, 2011). By means of a fine-grained manual linguistic analysis applied to the data sample, we identified five semantic patterns in the way the general public conceptualizes carbon in the environmental context.

In this paper, we present the methodology we have developed for the detection of lexical innovations, implemented here on a corpus of 650 million of French tweets covering a period from 2012 to 2019. Once detected, innovations are categorized as change or buzz according to whether their use has stabilized or dropped over time, and three phases of their dynamics are automatically identified. In order to validate our approach, we further analyse these dynamics by modelling the user network and characterising the speakers using these innovations via network variables. This allows us to propose preliminary observations on the role of individuals in the diffusion process of linguistic innovations which are in line with Milroy & Milroy’s (1997) theories and encourage further investigations.

The current study presents an analysis of a linguistic device supporting interactional coherence in computer-mediated communication (CMC). The analysis focused on the use of the German causative conjunction weil and, more specifically, on the syntactic variation of verb-final versus verb-second word order in the weil-clause. Verb-final word order in German indicates a dependent clause, whereas verb-second word order indicates an independent clause. While only the former is accepted in written Standard German, the latter is well documented in oral communication. Relying on freely available Facebook, WhatsApp, and Wikipedia corpus data, the analysis shows that both grammatical constructions are used in written CMC. In a specific usage across discrete messages, the syntactic variation of the weil-clause can serve to unambiguously identify its reference clause. While verb-final weil-clauses can be used to refer to previous messages by both an interlocutor and oneself, verb-second weil-clauses are predominantly used to relate to an own previous message. Thus, the syntactic variation in weil-clauses can be used for disambiguating references in written interactions.

The effectiveness of asynchronous online discussions as a learning tool in higher education critically depends on the participants’ ability to create a cohesive social space. Referring to one another’s messages is a key way to display a sense of affiliation and solidarity, and contribute to the consolidation of the learning community. However, research has shown that students often fail to adequately exploit this dimension of the online forum, as it requires considerable involvement in the activity and is very time-consuming.In the current study, we examined references to previous posts in a set of online discussions held during a one-term undergraduate course. The overall frequency of citations was low, with slightly over half of the 885 analyzed posts containing at least one reference. While this seems to indicate that a large number of participants conceived the activity as hardly interactive, for those who did quote their classmates, the preferred practice was using their first names, although the more formal name+surname pattern increased in the second half of the course, possibly indicating an awareness of the academic character of the activity. If the frequency and kind of mutual references can be taken as a measure of how successful asynchronous online discussions can prove as a collaborative learning tool, our results invite deep reflection regarding task design to ensure that students and instructors understand their goals in the same way.

Previous research has focused on message characteristics of public webcare conversations. However, webcare conversations are increasingly held on private social networking sites. Little is known to what extent organizations and stakeholders adapt their messages to the affordances of these channels. Employing the uses and gratifications theory, this paper reports on a content analysis of webcare conversations (n = 423) between stakeholders and the Netherlands Red Cross on public and private social networking sites. The stakeholder motives and organizational communication style were analyzed. The findings reveal private channels mainly serve the purpose of customer service: stakeholders approach the organization with questions; the organization uses message personalization to enhance the experience of one-to-one communication. Public social networking sites mainly serve the purpose of reputation management: stakeholders post remarks and compliments; the organization adapts the communication style of its messages to the affordances of the individual platform. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Polarization is generally considered as something undesirable that needs to be resolved. To reduce polarization, it is important to understand what processes cause it. Brandsma (2016) developed a framework that helps to understand the process of polarization. The framework also intends to formulate a communication strategy to address a polarized situation. The current study investigates how social media data as derived from a specific polarized case relates to Brandsma’s framework. Using Twitter data, we investigated the case of Black Pete in The Netherlands. Results provided support for the Brandsma framework. At the same time, this study provided additional, more nuanced insights into the subtle communicative aspect of polarization. Results showed that polarization is a process of change in which identity (“us” vs. “them”) as well as the issue itself (proponents vs. opponents) play an important role. By using these insights, the negative effects of polarization may be addressed differently. The key to reducing polarization lies in the ability to change while maintaining or developing the identity of groups that oppose each other.