Language Discrimination Research Articles

Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors in Women: The Impact of Race and Ethnicity: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association.

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in women, yet differences exist among certain racial and ethnic groups. Aside from traditional risk factors, behavioral and environmental factors and social determinants of health affect cardiovascular health and risk in women. Language barriers, discrimination, acculturation, and health care access disproportionately affect women of underrepresented races and ethnicities. These factors result in a higher prevalence of cardiovascular disease and significant challenges in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular conditions. Culturally sensitive, peer-led community and health care professional education is a necessary step in the prevention of cardiovascular disease. Equitable access to evidence-based cardiovascular preventive health care should be available for all women regardless of race and ethnicity; however, these guidelines are not equally incorporated into clinical practice. This scientific statement reviews the current evidence on racial and ethnic differences in cardiovascular risk factors and current cardiovascular preventive therapies for women in the United States.

Educational sociolinguistics: towards a pedagogical model for teaching Englishes instead of English

The current global status of the English language as a lingua franca has been running several discussions in the realm of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) (ANJOS, 2019; 2017; SIQUEIRA, 2020; DUBOC; SIQUEIRA, 2020). Accordingly, many research works, mostly those of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) (JENKINS, 2009; SCHMITZ, 2012), corroborate the need for new orientations for TEFL based on native-speaker standards. In this paper, we argue that the insertion of Educational Sociolinguistics into the TEFL reveals to be an advantageous pedagogical convergence: As Educational Sociolinguistics sets a pedagogical framework for language teaching under a variationist perspective (VERHOEVEN, 1997; CREESE, 2010; COAN; FREITAG, 2010), as such theoretical perspective is capable of triggering shifts in the TEFL once it leads to addressing relevant issues related to language diversity, which contributes to inhibiting linguistic discrimination upon non-standard varieties, such as those referred to under the ELF label. By analyzing core concepts of ELF and Educational Sociolinguistics, this theoretical research calls EFL teachers to teach “Englishes” – not only (standard American or British) English.

Linguistic Divide in between self and other: A Critical Analysis of Standardisation of Language: A North Kerala Village Study

This study examines the linguistic experiences of three caste categories in a community in North Kerala in an effort to comprehend how caste is embodied in language. It examines how linguistic inequality is caused by language standardisation and how people who speak non-standard languages deal with the issue without forsaking their mother tongue. Through a comparative comparison of three caste groups, including the scheduled caste (SC), other backward class (OBC), and the general category (GEN), the study was carried out in Thachankunnu in Kerala (GEN). The participants' direct experiences with the educational institutions are used to analyse the causes and effects of linguistic discrimination. The theoretical frame of the register has been used as the basis of analysis. The study found that participants experienced job loss and linguistic inequality in class participation, demonstrating the existence of language-based discrimination. In various contexts, dialect shifting is regarded as a means of concealing the social status and identity of vernacular language speakers. Identification of the value of mother tongue, language diversity, and resistance to deprivation all play essential roles in achieving language uniformity.

Primitive Bush People:Language and Discrimination On Social Media

Language is a vehicle through which people communicate with one another. The words and expressions people use to communicate with each other can either build relationships, act as a catalyst to commence conflict or fan the flames of an ongoing conflict. People do not usually find themselves in a conflict zone with persons to refer to them as “the other”. Social media brings people from around the globe to communicate but there is always a feeling of belonging that units these people in the social media speech community. This work examines the language of discrimination on social media by Cameroonians at the tribal, regional and gender levels. It looks at the language from the level of discursive vocabulary items used by Cameroonians on social media that can provoke feelings of discrimination towards one another. Data for this study comprised of some 50 WhatsApp and Facebook screenshots and some 25 questionnaires administered through random selection of users of the social media platforms under study. Using the theory of Critical Discourse Analysis by Norman Fairclough, (1995) and the discursive model of Language and Gender by Cameron (2005). The results reveal that 100% of the respondents agreed to the fact that there is the prevalence of the language of discrimination on social media in varying proportions at gender, regional and tribal level. 67% of those who have encountered such discrimination express that this can affect life out of social media, while the 33% of those who think it will not affect their lives put up several mechanisms to shield this effect like ignoring such posts, defending their kind or reproaching the author of the discriminatory post.

Underpinnings of explicit phonetic imitation: perception, production, and variability

This work tests the relative role of perception- and production-based predictors, and the relationship between them, in imitation of artificial accents varying in voice onset time (VOT), using a paradigm designed to target distinct sub-processes of imitation. We examined how explicit imitation of sentences differing systematically in voice onset time (VOT) was influenced by the type of VOT manipulation (lengthened vs. shortened) and by the presence vs. absence of voice-related variability in exposure. In contrast to previous work, participants imitated shortened as well as lengthened VOT, albeit with both qualitative and quantitative differences across the two manipulation types. The presence of voice-related variability inhibited imitation, but this inhibition was mitigated by a preceding session with no voice-related variability (i.e., sentences were acoustically identical except for VOT). We then tested the extent to which individual performance on the accent imitation task was related to performance on three other tasks: 1) discrimination of the target accents, 2) imitation of words in isolation drawn from a VOT continuum, and 3) discrimination of these same words. Performance on the accent discrimination task and the word-level imitation task, but not the word-level discrimination task, were independently predictive of accent imitation. Results are consistent with a conceptualization of explicit imitation as the sum of automatic phonetic convergence processes overlaid with distinct, controlled perceptual and articulatory factors that pattern differently across individuals. Phonetic imitation should not be considered as a monolithic skill, and models predicting variation in imitative ability must consider not only the potential sources of individual variability, but also at what level these sources of variability exert their influence. 

Examining the Independent Association Between Acculturative Stress and Psychological Distress Among Mexican Immigrants in New York City: An Exploratory Study.

This study examines the association between acculturative stress and psychological distress among Mexican immigrants living in New York City. It takes account factors such as language barriers, legal status, fear of deportation, and avoidance of social health and human services, and how these factors are implicated in the mental health status of the study population. Study draws from a community-based sample of Mexican American adults from the Social Network of Mexican Americans study recruited from a church-based community center in the Bronx, New York. Eighty Mexican immigrants were included in this analysis. Descriptive statistics were used to display participants' characteristics. Pearson correlation and multiple regressions were run to determine the relationship between acculturative stress and psychological distress, and also with each of the items from the acculturative stress scale. Both scales have been validated among Spanish-speaking Latino immigrants. A significant moderate positive relationship was found between acculturative stress and psychological distress. Within the acculturative stress scale, those items related to language discrimination, evasion of health services, and feeling guilty for leaving family/friends in home country had significant associations with increased psychological distress. The findings support the need for interventions that account for the major stressors associated with being a Mexican immigrant in the United States to prevent psychological distress, especially given the anti-immigration policies.

Speaking “broken” English: linguistic minorities building cross-cultural alliances in US higher education

We draw on our lived experiences as faculty of communication studies from Asia, living and working in the United States, to explore how U.S. higher education constituted our identity as linguistic minorities. We also draw on tenets of collaborative autoethnography, producing insight on three levels of linguistic discrimination against non-standard English accents: institutional quality control of our accents/dialects, disciplinary requirements for publishing in English, and everyday communication with locals. The article highlights the value of collaborative autoethnography as a method of inquiry and reflection in a transnational context, providing a rare account of the ways in which international faculty members’ experience resonates with and transforms local-born Southerners who also face discrimination for their stigmatized dialects. We critique the blind spot that privileges hegemonic English in our scholarly communication and propose listening-oriented communication pedagogy to empower voices from the margins within the academia.

Exploring individual differences in musical rhythm and grammar skills in school-aged children with typically developing language

A growing number of studies have shown a connection between rhythmic processing and language skill. It has been proposed that domain-general rhythm abilities might help children to tap into the rhythm of speech (prosody), cueing them to prosodic markers of grammatical (syntactic) information during language acquisition, thus underlying the observed correlations between rhythm and language. Working memory processes common to task demands for musical rhythm discrimination and spoken language paradigms are another possible source of individual variance observed in musical rhythm and language abilities. To investigate the nature of the relationship between musical rhythm and expressive grammar skills, we adopted an individual differences approach in N = 132 elementary school-aged children ages 5–7, with typical language development, and investigated prosodic perception and working memory skills as possible mediators. Aligning with the literature, musical rhythm was correlated with expressive grammar performance (r = 0.41, p < 0.001). Moreover, musical rhythm predicted mastery of complex syntax items (r = 0.26, p = 0.003), suggesting a privileged role of hierarchical processing shared between musical rhythm processing and children’s acquisition of complex syntactic structures. These relationships between rhythm and grammatical skills were not mediated by prosodic perception, working memory, or non-verbal IQ; instead, we uncovered a robust direct effect of musical rhythm perception on grammatical task performance. Future work should focus on possible biological endophenotypes and genetic influences underlying this relationship.

The Impact of Language on the Mental Health of Black Quebecers.

Quebec's English-speaking Black community finds itself at the intersection of racial and linguistic discrimination, which presents challenges to mental wellness. The present study aims to add necessary detail to the conversations surrounding racism and mental health in Canada while including language as a determinant of health and intersecting element affecting the wellbeing of English-speaking Black Quebecers. We recruited 531 Black adults who are currently living in Quebec to complete a survey on various community-relevant items, including their mental and physical health, their experiences of discrimination, and barriers to accessing mental healthcare. Our analyses revealed that English-speaking participants experience more discrimination across all types and report more barriers to mental healthcare and lower mental health than their French-speaking counterparts. Furthermore, we found that language also had a mediated effect on mental health through discrimination and barriers to mental healthcare. Our study adds to the sparse race-based and intersectional literature about Black people in Canada and substantiates a mechanism by which language affects mental health by exposing Black Quebecers to more discrimination and thus higher barriers to care.

Complexifying internal linguistic discrimination: bilingual Latinx teachers navigating Spanish language ideologies in bilingual programs

This qualitative study highlights the nuances behind apparent internal linguistic discrimination by Latinx bilingual teachers toward their Latinx students’ Spanish. Using a teacher solidarity lens and building on prior work in language ideologies and minoritized bilingual teacher identities, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 U.S. and non-U.S. born bilingual Latinx teachers. Specifically, we asked teachers to react to sentences containing features characteristic of U.S. Spanish varieties and their opinions of their students’ Spanish. Although teachers’ responses reflected hegemonic and monoglossic language ideologies, their answers did not suggest that teachers merely followed the bilingual program guidelines or had passively internalized these ideologies. Instead, teachers rationalized their decisions according to their (1) desire to protect their students from the linguistic discrimination they suffered themselves; (2) intent for Latinx students to maintain their Spanish language in the English-dominant U.S. social and educational system; and (3) belief that the ability to use ‘standard’ Spanish will result in students’ academic and professional success. In other words, teachers’ deep caring for their bilingual Latinx students and embodied knowledge of Latinx experiences influenced their pedagogical decisions regarding teaching of and in Spanish. Implications for the preparation of bilingual Latinx teachers are discussed here.

'Somali parents feel like they're on the outer': Somali mothers' experiences of parent-teacher relationships for their autistic children.

Good relationships between parents and schools can improve autistic children's school success. There are many reasons why families from different cultural backgrounds find it harder to develop good relationships with schools, such as language barriers, discrimination and unfamiliarity with education systems. We know little about what 'good relationships' look like for these families. Here, we worked with a team of autistic and non-autistic researchers as well as an Advisory Group of Somali parents to conduct interviews with 15 Somali mothers of kindergarten and school-age autistic children. We asked mothers about their experiences of their child's education, communication with teachers and what a good relationship with schools would look like. We also asked how they felt the Somali community understood autism. We looked for common things that mothers said. We found that mothers were very proud of their children. They had high expectations, particularly about what children could do by themselves. Mothers found it frustrating that teachers had low expectations, that schools were not good at communicating with them and that autism-specific skills and experience were uncommon in schools. They also reported racist attitudes towards their children. Mothers experienced stigma and lacked resources, but support was gained from their daughters and their religion. Mothers themselves were proactively increasing community awareness and knowledge about autism in the hope that they and their autistic children would be valued and better supported. Our work has implications for how teachers and schools can work together with Somali parents to forge better futures for autistic children.

Medical Students’ Experiences of Mistreatment by Clinicians and Academics at a South African University

Phenomenon: Tertiary education in post-apartheid South Africa has faced many challenges regarding class, language, and race. Even though previously white Afrikaans-rooted universities now have a diverse student population, recent student protests have highlighted the ongoing need for decolonization in higher education. In addition, the majority of public hospitals in the country function under significant staffing, infrastructure, and equipment shortages. Although the mistreatment of medical students has been well described internationally, to date no South African data exists. The aim of this study was to identify experiences of mistreatment of medical students by clinicians and academics at a South African university and to describe the type of mistreatment experienced, the perceived mental health effects, and the influence on academic performance, resilience, and students’ knowledge of current reporting systems. Approach: A cross-sectional study was conducted through a locally developed online survey of 443 medical students at a South African university in May to June 2018, comprising of both open and closed ended questions. Levels of psychological distress (K10) and resilience (CD-RISC -10) were measured. Chi-square and student t-tests were used for the analysis of associations, and linear regressions were used to assess predictors of psychological distress. Qualitative data were analyzed thematically using the approach described by Braun and Clarke. Findings: Of 800 eligible medical students at Stellenbosch University, 443 students (55.4%) completed the survey. Mistreatment, comprising of being ignored/excluded (83.4%), offensive gestures (75.0%), verbal abuse (65.1%) and discrimination (64.4%), was prevalent and pervasive, and was perpetrated mainly by registrars (46.7%) and other medical staff (43.8%). Mistreatment was associated with psychological distress, which was generally high and more severe for females. Resilience, which was higher for males, moderated the effects of gender and perpetrator type on distress. Only 15% of students who had experienced mistreatment, either directly or indirectly, reported it, of which more than half (52.8%) were not happy with the outcome. Most students (80.9%) were not aware of the systems in place to report mistreatment. Insights: Student mistreatment is more highly prevalent among medical students at a South African university compared with studies conducted internationally. Despite over 20 years of democracy in South Africa, high rates of racial and gender discrimination were reported and descriptions of racial, language and gender discrimination were particularly concerning. Since the findings of this study, an anti-bullying poster-campaign has been initiated at the university as well as an online reporting system.

Language discrimination, interpersonal shame, and depressive symptoms among international students with Chinese heritage: collective self-esteem as a buffer

ABSTRACT Although perceived language discrimination (PLD) is associated with negative psychological outcomes among international students with Chinese heritage, existing research on PLD is scarce. This study aims to address this gap. Given that many Chinese cultures are characterized as shame-based, we examined whether PLD would be associated with interpersonal shame (i.e. mediator) which in turn would predict depressive symptoms. We also investigated whether collective self-esteem, a culturally relevant variable, would buffer against the negative effects of PLD on interpersonal shame and attenuate the mediation effect from PLD through interpersonal shame to depressive symptoms (i.e. moderated mediation). This cross-sectional study utilized self-report surveys and collected data from 222 international students with Chinese heritage from different regions of the U.S. The results showed that interpersonal shame mediated the association between PLD and depressive symptoms. In addition, membership collective self-esteem moderated the association between PLD and interpersonal shame. The results also indicated that the mediation effects from PLD to depression through interpersonal shame were significant at low and moderate levels but not significant at high levels of membership collective self-esteem. Findings highlight the protective role of membership collective self-esteem for those who have experienced PLD and are struggling with interpersonal shame and depressive symptoms.

Linguistic Discrimination in Science: Can English Disfluency Help Debias Scientific Research?

ABSTRACT The English language now dominates scientific communications. Yet, many scientists have English as their second language. Their English proficiency may therefore often be more limited than that of a ‘native speaker’, and their scientific contributions (e.g. manuscripts) in English may frequently contain linguistic features that disrupt the fluency of a reader’s, or listener’s information processing even when the contributions are understandable. Scientific gatekeepers (e.g. journal reviewers) sometimes cite these features to justify negative decisions on manuscripts. Such justifications may rest on the prima facie plausible assumption that linguistic characteristics that hinder fast and easy understandability of scientific contributions are epistemically undesirable in science. I shall raise some doubts about this assumption by drawing on empirical research on processing fluency and its biasing effects. I also argue that directing scientists with English as a foreign language toward approaching ‘native-level’ English can have the negative consequence of reducing their potential to make scientific belief formation more reliable. These points suggest that one seemingly compelling justification for linguistically discriminating against scientific contributions in ‘non-native’ English is questionable and that the common insistence by scientific gatekeepers on ‘native-like’ English may be epistemically harmful to science.

FOREIGN ACCENT, IDENTITY AND ACCENT DISCRIMINATION: A LITERATURE REVIEW

FOREIGN ACCENT, IDENTITY AND ACCENT DISCRIMINATION: A LITERATURE REVIEW

Сultural turn in Ukrainian translation

The article aims to provide an overview of core knowledge and theoretical assumptions on recognizing translation as a tool for social and cultural change, particularly evident in postcolonial contexts marked by linguistic discrimination and inequity as well as accentuate on the “cultural turn” in Ukrainian context. The phenomenon comes to be viewed as a noteworthy shift from traditional linguistic conversions towards the ones to incorporate cultural and ideological transfer that is extremely important for the current Ukrainian political agenda. In the context of translation studies, the “cultural turn” has had a significant impact on how scholars and practitioners approach the process of translating texts from one language and culture to another. Current advances in translation studies since the late 1990s have exposed a notable shift towards examining the ideological and sociopolitical dimensions of translation. This paradigm overwhelms the idea that every translation is not only a linguistic, but also a social and cultural notion, and accordingly, the latter extends beyond linguistic conversions that invariably encompasses the transfer of meaning from one culture to another. Rather than viewing translation as a simple transfer of meaning between languages, we recognize the translator as an active agent, intervening in political and ideological processes. These acknowledge translator’s role as the one encompassing domination, oppression, submission, or resistance within social groups, i.e., more than a mere reproduction or ‘replay’ of the author’s individual style. Consequently, translation is viewed as a tool for social and cultural change, particularly evident in postcolonial contexts marked by linguistic inequality. The 1990s witnessed the emergence of postcolonial translation theories, applicable not only to explicit postcolonial conditions but also to the context of the language discrimination. The above-mentioned issues come to be extremely imperative on the current Ukrainian ideological agenda when accentuating on the problems of how translations help to create national identity resilient to the russian cultural domination. Keywords: literary translation, cultural turn, linguistic inequity, Ukrainian translators, nation-centered mission of translation

World Health Organization myth busters and indigenous perceptions of COVID-19: Quechua and Shipibo communities

When the COVID (SARS-V2) pandemic swept across the world, it impacted Indigenous communities more than others. This is due to a variety of reasons: socioeconomic injustice and racialization, lack of access to equitable healthcare, and linguistic discrimination. As a result, several communities and community types demonstrated this effect when perceptions of inferences or other COVID-related information were measured. This paper reports on a participatory collaborative study with two Indigenous communities in rural Peru—ten Quechua-speaking communities in Southern Cuzco and three Shipibo-speaking communities in Ucayali regions. We investigate the communities' level of preparedness for the crisis by eliciting answers based on the World Health Organization COVID ‘MythBusters’ in a form of a semi-structured interview. Interviews were transcribed, translated, and analyzed in search of the effect of three variables: gender (male/female), language group (Shipibo/Quechua), and proficiency in the Indigenous language (from 0 to 4). Data reveal that all three variables have some effect on the target comprehension of COVID-related messages. Additionally, we explore other possible explanations.

A Deep Learning Approach for Identifying and Discriminating Spoken Arabic Among Other Languages

Spoken Language Identification (SLID) is an important step in speech-to-speech translation systems and multi-lingual automatic speech recognition. In recent research, deep learning mechanisms have been the prevailing approaches for spoken language identification. This paper aims to study, detect, and analyze spoken languages similar to Arabic in pronouncing certain words and then proposes a deep learning-based architecture, specifically the Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (BLSTM), for spoken Arabic language identification and discrimination between these similar languages, namely, German, Spanish, French, and Russian, all of which are taken from Mozilla speech corpus languages. Additionally, our work involves a linguistic study of these considered languages. A total of ten thousand speakers are chosen for all five languages, and the BLSTM architecture is designed and implemented using acoustic signal features and applied to five experiments in this paper. The results show a precision of 98.97%, 98.73%, 98.47%, and 99.75% for identifying the spoken Arabic language separately along with German, Spanish, French, and Russian, respectively. Additionally, we achieved an average accuracy of 95.15% for discriminating between all these considered five languages in terms of the pronunciation of words. Our findings confirm that a BLSTM architecture is able to distinguish between observable similar pronunciations of words in considered languages.

Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Anti-Lingual &amp; Accent Bias Stereotyping in Virtual Reality and the Sustainable Development of Linguistic Response

Raising awareness through Virtual Experiencing (RAVE) and a Cross-Cultural Perspective on Raising Awareness through Virtual Experiencing (C-RAVE) approaches are used in this article to promote awareness of concerns relating to linguistic stereotyping. Virtual Reality (VR) technology has completely changed several facets of modern life, including instruction, training and entertainment. We give a summary of the techniques employed to increase awareness of how stereotypes might distort our vision. The patterns of the answers provided by the participants demonstrate that the reported gender of the speaker in addition to the accent (native vs. non-native), has an impact on the respondents' assessments of performance. Additionally, we were able to show that the discussions and ideas produced by these response patterns led to a rise in self-awareness of language and stereotyping-related problems. The paper gives a general description of RAVE and examines how it may improve education, create empathy and foster good social change. Focus on a critique of our methodologies and place our work within a larger debate of strategies and efforts for how educational institutions might actively contribute to combating (language) discrimination and bias in many ways. The relevance of Raising Awareness by Virtual Reality and Cross-Cultural Raising of Awareness by Virtual Reality in fostering inclusion and understanding in a society that is becoming more sustainable globally connected is highlighted in the article’s conclusion.

Medical text classification based on the discriminative pre-training model and prompt-tuning.

Medical text classification, as a fundamental medical natural language processing task, aims to identify the categories to which a short medical text belongs. Current research has focused on performing the medical text classification task using a pre-training language model through fine-tuning. However, this paradigm introduces additional parameters when training extra classifiers. Recent studies have shown that the "prompt-tuning" paradigm induces better performance in many natural language processing tasks because it bridges the gap between pre-training goals and downstream tasks. The main idea of prompt-tuning is to transform binary or multi-classification tasks into mask prediction tasks by fully exploiting the features learned by pre-training language models. This study explores, for the first time, how to classify medical texts using a discriminative pre-training language model called ERNIE-Health through prompt-tuning. Specifically, we attempt to perform prompt-tuning based on the multi-token selection task, which is a pre-training task of ERNIE-Health. The raw text is wrapped into a new sequence with a template in which the category label is replaced by a [UNK] token. The model is then trained to calculate the probability distribution of the candidate categories. Our method is tested on the KUAKE-Question Intention Classification and CHiP-Clinical Trial Criterion datasets and obtains the accuracy values of 0.866 and 0.861. In addition, the loss values of our model decrease faster throughout the training period compared to the fine-tuning. The experimental results provide valuable insights to the community and suggest that prompt-tuning can be a promising approach to improve the performance of pre-training models in domain-specific tasks.