Language Discrimination Research Articles

Symposium 09: Neuropsychological Test Translation, Adaptation, and Development Part 2: Lessons learned from Vietnam, India, Australia, and the INS Cultural SIG

Summary Abstract:The history of psychological test translation includes problems of inaccuracy and unintentional or intentional racial, ethnic, and linguistic discrimination. Methods for accurate and fair psychological test translation, adaptation, and development have advanced, but neuropsychology has been slow to implement these methods. Inadequate translations and adaptations of neuropsychological tests may substantially impact their psychometric properties for target populations, increasing risk of clinical errors and other harms.The International Test Commission's (ITC) 2017 Guidelines for Tests Translation and Adaptation summarize current technologies for tests whose constructs depend upon the semantic content of the items. This is helpful, but insufficient because many neuropsychological tests focus on cognitive, linguistic, and emotional constructs that are measured by processes other than semantic content. Neuropsychological tests may depend on word length, familiarity, written form, visual stimuli, culture-dependent behavioral expectations, or other features apart from meaning. Furthermore, the ITC Guidelines were developed primarily from experiences of translation and adaptation among European languages, with populations with a restricted range of education and cultures, hindering their generalization to more diverse populations. To make the guidelines practical for neuropsychological users, the Assessment Workgroup of the INS Cultural Neuropsychology Special Interest Group has developed neuropsychological commentary on the ITC Guidelines. The Workgroup has also sponsored a discussion group among members involved in neuropsychological test translation, adaptation, and development projects around the world. Our objectives in this symposium are to present an overview of our neuropsychological commentary on the ITC Guidelines and illustrate the relevance of these guidelines and commentaries through presentations of projects from around the world. At the 2022 INS New Orleans meeting our group presented lessons learned from Africa, Australia, Europe, South America, and South Asia. In the current Part 2 presentation we will present projects from Australia, India, and Vietnam and lessons derived from comparisons among many projects. Our panel will discuss lessons learned from these projects and outline potential future diversity strategies, including the following: The concept of universal or culture-fair tests is unrealistic, naive, and potentially harmful.The concept of culture-broad tests and test paradigms is viable but requires empirical verification in all applications.Even with viable culture-broad tests, multicultural neuropsychology requires specific cultural and linguistic knowledge, skill, and sensitivity.Drawing is a learned skill that is viable for neuropsychological testing only when baseline abilities are well-understood.Verbal fluency is a cognitive task that varies in its nature depending upon characteristics of specific languages and their writing systems as well as the nature of education.One pragmatic possible strategy for better serving speakers of relatively rare languages is to develop ways of doing neuropsychology designed for those who speak popular languages moderately well as their second language.

‘That’s how we got around it’: a qualitative exploration of healthcare professionals’ experiences of care provision for asylum applicants’ with limited English proficiency in UK contingency accommodation

ObjectivesThe inadequate provision of language interpretation for people with limited English proficiency (LEP) is a determinant of poor health, yet interpreters are underused. This research explores the experiences of National...

Institutional language policing and the maintenance of race-class inequalities

In this article, we show how Ofsted operates as institutional language police, and how the inspectorate's attitudes about language maintain race-class inequalities under a guise of social justice, equality and evidence-based practice. Our research has repeatedly demonstrated how Ofsted reproduces long-standing, deficit-based and colonial logics that marginalised children lack adequate language, and that school is a place where they can be compensated for these supposed shortcomings. We outline three key areas of this work. First, we trace the kind of research about language that Ofsted draws on to build the so-called evidence-base which underpins its contemporary policies. Second, we reveal the language ideologies that circulate in school inspection reports and how the inspectorate evaluates the language of teachers and pupils. Finally, we show how these stances on language have direct impact on the lives of teachers and children in schools. We argue that the extent of the language policing and discrimination we have uncovered in Ofsted's policies and reporting demonstrates that these are not simply individual mistakes but an institutionalised, systemic and normalised feature of the inspectorate's practice.

Afghan Migrants in Germany: Cross-Cultural Communication and Impact of Immigration on Afghan Culture

The purpose of this case study was to determine how migration affected Afghan culture and cultural relations among Afghan immigrants who lived in Germany. It examined the problems faced by Afghan immigrants, their coping mechanisms, and the preservation of their cultural identity. A qualitative study methodology was utilized, and in-depth interviews were conducted with 15 Afghan migrants residing in various German cities. Secondary data was obtained through literature reviews and other relevant sources, while primary data was gathered from the interviews. To identify significant findings and patterns related to the study's objectives, a thematic analysis was performed using NVivo 12. The study revealed that language limitations, cultural differences, and discrimination posed significant obstacles for Afghan migrants in their cross-cultural communication efforts. However, through community groups, cultural events, and educational initiatives, they actively participated in preserving their cultural heritage. The results underscored the importance of cultural awareness, empathy, and tolerance in fostering intercultural understanding and facilitating integration. Consequently, practical recommendations were proposed, including expanding Afghan immigrants ' access to language instruction, cultural resources, and support systems. Creating a welcoming environment also necessitated the development of strong bonds between German residents and Afghan migrants. This study contributes to the field of intercultural communication and offers guidance to practitioners and policymakers seeking to integrate Afghan immigrants into German society.

Challenges Facing African International Students at Research Universities in the United States

Aim: The aim of the study was to explore the challenges facing African International Students (AIS) at research universities in the U.S. and the support systems used to overcome the challenges.
 Methods: Methods used to gather information included discussions, conceptual framework modeling, and a thorough literature review, employing a hand-searching journal and books approach.
 Results: The findings of the study revealed that a significant number of AIS encounter different challenges upon entering research universities in the United States. These obstacles include language barriers, cultural shock, discrimination, stereotypes, accommodation and transportation issues, financial difficulties, as well as stress and anxiety. However, even before setting foot in the U.S., these students face a range of challenges, including problems with school applications and associated fees, technical difficulties, issues with English language tests, stress and anxiety, visa acquisition, and the search for suitable accommodation.
 Conclusion: The study provides insight into the challenges facing AIS and provides coping strategies that can be used to mitigate the challenges.
 Recommendations: A newly developed framework was constructed. suggesting that AIS should develop the habit of seeking help and asking questions. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of fostering self-motivation and practicing self-care.

On Politically-Driven Language Discrimination in Post-Soviet Space (from the Example of Occupied Abkhazia)

The aim of this paper is to reflect the policy of the government of Georgia towards creating higher education opportunities for the youth residing in Abkhazia and outline the supporting measures taken by the Georgian side that contribute to Abkhazian youth’s integration into the mainstream of academia locally and worldwide. Accordingly, as the background of the issue, we start with a brief description of the language ideology in the occupied area and then move to a discussion of the factors which demonstrate the opportunities that ensure and simplify access to higher quality education in Georgia as well as abroad for the targeted group. There are two substantive issues: first, Russian language ideology imposition on Abkhaz youth and, second, the benefits of acquiring a degree in Georgia. We argue that the collapse of the Soviet Union and Georgia’s recent pro-Western politics have paved the road to new possibilities for cultivating a linguistically diverse, multiethnic, and tolerant society throughout Georgia. Young people living in both the occupied region and Georgia represent the generation that should cohabitate and find a common path of understanding and peace in order to build a common better future.

Speaker Profiling Based on the Short-Term Acoustic Features of Vowels

Speech samples can provide valuable information regarding speaker characteristics, including their social backgrounds. Accent variations with speaker backgrounds reflect corresponding acoustic features of speech, and these acoustic variations can be analyzed to assist in tracking down criminals from speech samples available as forensic evidence. Speech accent identification has recently received significant consideration in the speech forensics research community. However, most works have utilized long-term temporal modelling of acoustic features for accent classification and disregarded the stationary acoustic characteristics of particular phoneme articulations. This paper analyzes short-term acoustic features extracted from a central time window of English vowel speech segments for accent discrimination. Various feature computation techniques have been compared for the accent classification task. It has been found that using spectral features as an input gives better performance than using cepstral features, with the lower filters contributing more significantly to the classification task. Moreover, detailed analysis has been presented for time window durations and frequency bin resolution to compute short-term spectral features concerning accent discrimination. Using longer time durations generally requires higher frequency resolution to optimize classification performance. These results are significant, as they show the benefits of using spectral features for speaker profiling despite the popularity of cepstral features for other speech-related tasks.

Language, religion, and workplace discrimination: intersectional microaggressions in India

ABSTRACT Microaggression has recently gained prominence. It is a psychological construct that examines everyday slights experienced by marginalized groups. While much of the research has stemmed from the United States and has focused on race, gender, and sexuality, very few studies have investigated ways in which complex and overlapping identities involving language, religion, and caste/class intersect in cross-cultural workplace settings in the Global South. This study fills this gap by exploring a minoritized group carrying a ‘double discrimination’ burden due to their religion and socio-economic historical class background. It examines in what ways, if any, Indian Meos experience microaggressions in cross-cultural workplace settings. In doing so, it extends research that remains understudied. One of the criticisms against microaggression studies is their reliance on self-reporting and recall of past instances, thus lacking validity. This paper proposes conversation analysis as a useful approach offering an empirically grounded analysis of microaggression in action.

Mediated Bricolage and the Sociolinguistic Co-Construction of No Sabo Kids

Sociolinguistic styles and the resultant ascribed identities are understood as the product of simultaneous variables, leading to the notion of bricolage, or the co-occurrence of variables and their collective indexical meanings. Relatively little attention has been paid to these processes as they manifest on social media platforms. The goal of the current paper is to understand which linguistic and thematic features co-occur in the online production of the no sabo kid style and identity, which manifests as a form of linguistic discrimination towards U.S. Latinx youth. “Hashtag communities” were used to locate posts about no sabo kids on TikTok (N = 95), and videos were automatically and manually coded for salient linguistic and discursive resources in the online no sabo kid community. The results show the co-occurrence of code-switching and phonological and lexical variation, alongside discursive themes, namely ‘proficiency’, ‘ethnicity’, and ‘performative lexical gaps’. I argue that the no sabo kid hashtag community is a mediated manifestation of ideologies surrounding U.S. Latinx bilinguals, where a supposed lack of proficiency in Spanish and grammatical blending of Spanish and English index inauthentic ethnicity. Mediated instantiations of sociolinguistic styles shed light on how linguistic features become enregistered through multimodality and semiotic bricolage.

‘The most humane of all weapons’: Discrimination, airpower, and precision doctrine

AbstractHow did the norm of discrimination become the dominant yardstick to measure the ethics of US airpower? Conventional accounts suggest that as elites and publics embraced norms of discrimination, this pushed US air forces to adopt a precision doctrine, one that demands accurately striking military, and not civilian, targets. Relying on a pragmatic reading of norm contestation and settling, we suggest that conventional explanations have the causal story reversed: it was not the strengthening of the norm of discrimination that led US air forces to commit to precision bombing. It was the commitment to precision bombing that led to the strengthening of the norm of discrimination. As precision technology became available during the interwar period, air-force officers co-opted the language of discrimination to justify their emerging doctrine. This co-optation of the language of discrimination would not only settle these norms as the guiding ethics of airpower. It would also transform them, redefining these norms in ways that privileged the process of precision targeting, rather than the outcome of civilian harm.

Babies, bugs and brains: How the early microbiome associates with infant brain and behavior development.

Growing evidence is demonstrating the connection between the microbiota gut-brain axis and neurodevelopment. Microbiota colonization occurs before the maturation of many neural systems and is linked to brain health. Because of this it has been hypothesized that the early microbiome interactions along the gut-brain axis evolved to promote advanced cognitive functions and behaviors. Here, we performed a pilot study with a multidisciplinary approach to test if the microbiota composition of infants is associated with measures of early cognitive development, in particular neural rhythm tracking; language (forward speech) versus non-language (backwards speech) discrimination; and social joint attention. Fecal samples were collected from 56 infants between four and six months of age and sequenced by shotgun metagenomic sequencing. Of these, 44 performed the behavioral Point and Gaze test to measure joint attention. Infants were tested on either language discrimination using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS; 25 infants had usable data) or neural rhythm tracking using electroencephalogram (EEG; 15 had usable data). Infants who succeeded at the Point and Gaze test tended to have increased Actinobacteria and reduced Firmicutes at the phylum level; and an increase in Bifidobacterium and Eggerthella along with a reduction in Hungatella and Streptococcus at the genus level. Measurements of neural rhythm tracking associated negatively to the abundance of Bifidobacterium and positively to the abundance of Clostridium and Enterococcus for the bacterial abundances, and associated positively to metabolic pathways that can influence neurodevelopment, including branched chain amino acid biosynthesis and pentose phosphate pathways. No associations were found for the fNIRS language discrimination measurements. Although the tests were underpowered due to the small pilot sample sizes, potential associations were identified between the microbiome and measurements of early cognitive development that are worth exploring further.

Discrimination during childbirth and postpartum care utilization among Black birthing people in California, United States.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between discrimination during childbirth hospitalization and postpartum care utilization among Black birthing people in California, United States. This was a secondary analysis of data from the Listening to Mothers in California survey, a population-based survey of individuals with a singleton hospital-based birth in California in 2016. The primary outcome was number of postpartum care visits. The primary exposures were racial, language, and insurance discrimination. A multiple linear regression model was used to estimate associations between discrimination and postpartum care use, adjusting for sociodemographic covariates. Black birthing people in the sample had an average of two postpartum visits. Almost 15% of the sample reported one or more forms of discrimination during hospital-based childbirth. In adjusted models, racial discrimination (β = 0.09, 95% CI = 0.04-0.14, p < 0.01) and language discrimination (β = 1.03, 95% CI = 0.98-1.07, p < 0.01) were associated with increased postpartum visits, while insurance discrimination was linked to decreased postpartum visits (β = -0.96, 95% CI = -1.04 to -0.89, p < 0.01). Among Black birthing people in California, the drivers of postpartum care utilization after childbirth are complex. There are multiple negative drivers (e.g., experiencing racial and language discrimination and unmet needs), barriers (e.g., insurance discrimination), and positive drivers (e.g., clinician type and education) that affect postpartum care utilization among Black birthing people.

Toward a stable and low-resource PLM-based medical diagnostic system via prompt tuning and MoE structure

Machine learning (ML) has been extensively involved in assistant disease diagnosis and prediction systems to emancipate the serious dependence on medical resources and improve healthcare quality. Moreover, with the booming of pre-training language models (PLMs), the application prospect and promotion potential of machine learning methods in the relevant field have been further inspired. PLMs have recently achieved tremendous success in diverse text processing tasks, whereas limited by the significant semantic gap between the pre-training corpus and the structured electronic health records (EHRs), PLMs cannot converge to anticipated disease diagnosis and prediction results. Unfortunately, establishing connections between PLMs and EHRs typically requires the extraction of curated predictor variables from structured EHR resources, which is tedious and labor-intensive, and even discards vast implicit information.In this work, we propose an Input Prompting and Discriminative language model with the Mixture-of-experts framework (IPDM) by promoting the model’s capabilities to learn knowledge from heterogeneous information and facilitating the feature-aware ability of the model. Furthermore, leveraging the prompt-tuning mechanism, IPDM can inherit the impacts of the pre-training in downstream tasks exclusively through minor modifications. IPDM remarkably outperforms existing models, proved by experiments on one disease diagnosis task and two disease prediction tasks. Finally, experiments with few-feature and few-sample demonstrate that IPDM achieves significant stability and impressive performance in predicting chronic diseases with unclear early-onset characteristics or sudden diseases with insufficient data, which verifies the superiority of IPDM over existing mainstream methods, and reveals the IPDM can powerfully address the aforementioned challenges via establishing a stable and low-resource medical diagnostic system for various clinical scenarios.

Linguistic racism: Origins and implications

This special issue of Ethnicities focuses on the phenomenon of linguistic racism. Linguistic racism constitutes the intersection of language, race/ism, and in/equality, as seen in racialized discourses on the relative status of languages and bi/multilingual language use, particularly as these are directed toward non-dominant language speakers. The theoretical framings underpinning the contributions in this issue draw on sociological discussions of critical race theory, and sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological discussions of language ideologies, linguistic racism, and raciolinguistics. Racialized discourses of language (use) are situated within sociohistorical and sociopolitical contexts, grounded in nationalism and colonialism, that privilege dominant national and international languages, public monolingualism, and native-speaker competence in those languages. In contrast, related linguistic hierarchies of prestige pathologize the language uses of non-dominant language – often Indigenous and/or bi/multilingual – speakers and construct their language use in both overtly and covertly racialized terms. The result is regular linguistic discrimination and subordination experienced by non-dominant language speakers, inevitably framed within wider racialized institutional and everyday discursive practices. The contributions herein explore these issues in relation to Indigenous and other non-dominant language use(s), and their (mis)representation, in the media, workplace, and academia, in the contexts of New Zealand, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, and the United States.

Foreign Language Proficiency, Language Discrimination, and Health Outcomes in Foreign Subsidiaries

Foreign Language Proficiency, Language Discrimination, and Health Outcomes in Foreign Subsidiaries

Investigating the causes of the downfall of democracy in Afghanistan from 2001 up to 2021

Democracy in a country always fall due to internal and external factors. The collapse of Democracy not only brings political instability in a country, but it can negative impacts of the countries that have Democracy system. In developing countries, external and internal problems cause Democracy to fall. Afghanistan's geopolitics place is very important for superpowers, these powers have tried to control political power in Afghanistan directly and indirectly. For this reason, this country has always been dependent on the superpowers of the world, such as England in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Soviet Union in the 20th century, and America in the 21st century, it has been the external factors that caused political instability in Afghanistan, internal factors such as ethnic and language discrimination, economic dependence, weaken the political system causes Democracy to fall in Afghanistan.

Implementation and Impact of Language Policy: The Case of Kyrgyz Students

Language policy is crucial to any society's cultural and political fabric, as it shapes how individuals and groups communicate, interact, and identify. Language policy has important implications for nation-building and the creation of national identity. Language policy can also significantly impact university students' sense of belonging. Overt and inclusive policies can provide opportunities for students to develop language skills and cultural competencies, enhancing their academic and professional opportunities. Covert and implicit policies can create barriers to interaction between different language groups, leading to social fragmentation, exclusion, and discrimination. Overt language policies are those that are openly acknowledged and implemented, while covert policies are those that are more subtle and may be hidden. Overt language policies that promote a single national language can unite diverse groups within a nation. However, these policies can also lead to the suppression of linguistic and cultural diversity within a nation, potentially undermining the cultural richness of that society. Covert language policies can also have significant impacts on identity and national unity. For example, language policies not openly acknowledged can lead to confusion or mistrust among different language groups. These policies can reinforce power imbalances between language groups, perpetuating existing inequalities. Considering these concepts, this study aimed to answer the following questions: 1. What LP has been implemented in Kyrgyzstan? 2. How has LP affected university students? Information on the language policy implemented in Kyrgyzstan was necessary to answer the first question, which involved examining laws, banknotes, newspaper titles, and dissertation catalogs. It was necessary to gather data on how the language policy has affected the students to answer the second question. In addition, in-depth interviews with LP experts helped clarify both questions. The collected information was analyzed using textual analysis and statistical methods. Data analysis showed that different models of language policy were implemented in Kyrgyzstan, including multilingualism, bilingualism, and monolingualism. Overt, covert, and vague LP were used to promote these models. These models and methods have formed segregated communities, language discrimination, and different linguistic identities within the same ethnic groups.

A cognitive dissonance approach to moderating listener perception of L2 English speakers

ABSTRACT Research has shown that listener bias and stereotyping affect listeners’ attitudes towards L2 English speakers [Lindemann, S., Litzenberg, J., & Subtirelu, N. (2014). Problematizing the Dependence on L1 Norms in Pronunciation Teaching: Attitudes Toward Second-Language Accents. In J. Levis & A. Moyer (Eds.). Social Dynamics in Second Language Accent (171–194)]. However, little research has explored ways to mitigate such prejudice to combat the linguistic discrimination prevalent in our society [Kang, O., D. Rubin, and S. Lindemann. 2015. “Mitigating U.S. Undergraduates’ Attitudes Toward International Teaching Assistants.” TESOL Quarterly 49 (4): 681–706; Subtirelu, N. C., and S. Lindemann. 2016. “Teaching First Language Speakers to Communicate Across Linguistic Difference: Addressing Attitudes, Comprehension, and Strategies.” Applied Linguistics 37 (6): 765–783]. The present study explored the effect of a one-week intervention on U.S. undergraduate students’ perception of L2 speakers. This study included three intact undergraduate-level writing classes (n = 25 each), two intervention groups and one control. Before the intervention, all students completed a perception questionnaire to measure listener perceptual judgement of language attitude, comprehensibility, and accentedness of L2 English speakers. The intervention included (a) one 50-minute discussion which explicitly addressed social justice issues related to multilingual speakers, designed according to the cognitive dissonance theory [Festinger, L. 1957. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson] and (b) three 50-minute laboratory sessions for reflection papers. An immediate post-test and a delayed post-test (11 weeks after) were administered. Linear mixed-effects models showed significant and sustained improvement of language attitude and comprehensibility ratings for the intervention groups across time, but not for the control group. The findings provide a relatively short, easily replicable, and sustainably effective intervention program to mitigate listener bias against L2 English speakers.

A teacher’s facilitation of Mexican immigrant students’ border crossings in a dual-language classroom

ABSTRACT This ethnographic study utilized border theory to examine how a bilingual Latinx teacher created equitable instruction for Mexican immigrant second-graders in a 50–50 dual-language (DL) classroom in the U.S. Midwest. Approximately half the students in the DL classroom came from Spanish-speaking, working-class homes, and half from English-speaking, middle-class homes. The teacher reduced linguistic borders when she drew from her personal experiences and knowledge of bilingualism to forbid linguistic discrimination, separated students’ second-language mastery from their conceptual understanding, and facilitated translanguaging (bilingual individuals’ use of integrated linguistic resources). She promoted class border crossings when she intentionally grouped students and told the English-dominant students that they were disrespecting their Spanish-dominant classmates when they refused to speak Spanish. Borders that the teacher could not change were the high status of English at the school and the English-dominant students’ expectation that the Spanish-dominant students would help them with their Spanish but that they did not have to reciprocate. Educational implications included training DL teachers so that they know how to reduce the privileges of the English speakers and how to support translanguaging. A call for more classroom research to address the power dynamics between language-minority and majority students in DL classrooms was made.

Experience of South and Southeast Asian minority women in Hong Kong during COVID-19 pandemic: a qualitative study

BackgroundHong Kong has a relatively low incidence rate of COVID-19 across the globe. Nevertheless, ethnic minorities in Hong Kong, especially South Asians (SAs) and Southeast Asians (SEAs), face numerous physical, mental, social, economic, cultural and religious challenges during the pandemic. This study explores the experiences of SA and SEA women in a predominantly Chinese metropolitan city.MethodsTen SA and SEA women were recruited and face-to-face interviews were conducted. Questions about participants’ daily life experience, physical and mental health conditions, economic situation and social interaction amid COVID-19 pandemic were asked to assess the impact of COVID-19.ResultsSAs and SEAs have a distinctive family culture, and women experienced significant physical and mental impact of COVID-19 due to their unique gender role in the family. In addition to taking care of their family in Hong Kong, SA and SEA women also had to mentally and financially support family members residing in their home countries. Access to COVID-related information was restricted due to language barrier. Public health measures including social distancing imposed extra burden on ethnic minorities with limited social and religious support.ConclusionsEven when COVID-19 incidence rate is relatively low in Hong Kong, the pandemic made life even more challenging for SAs and SEAs, which is a community already struggling with language barriers, financial woes, and discrimination. This in turn could have led to greater health inequalities. Government and civil organizations should take the social determinants of health inequalities into account when implementing COVID-19-related public health policies and strategies.