Linguistic Expectancy Research Articles

Does the Linguistic Expectancy Bias Extend to a Second Language?

The linguistic expectancy bias (LEB) reflects the tendency to describe expectancy-consistent behavior more abstractly than expectancy-inconsistent. The current studies replicate the LEB in Portuguese and examine it in a second language (English). Earlier studies found differences in processing a first language (L1) and a second language (L2) shaping affective and cognitive processes. We did not expect these differences to shape the LEB because controlled lexical decisions (e.g., use of verbs and adjectives) are unlikely, even when using L2. Participants wrote stereotypically male or female behavioral descriptions for male and female targets. A new group of participants read those descriptions and was asked about their causes. Expectancy-consistent behavior was described more abstractly and shaped more dispositional inferences in L1 and L2. Aside from replicating the LEB in a different language, these studies indicate that structural features of language preserve a linguistic bias with implications for social perception even when using a second language.

Language patterns of outgroup prejudice

Although explicit verbal expression of prejudice and stereotypes may have become less common due to the recent rise of social norms against prejudice, prejudice in language still persists in more subtle forms. It remains unclear whether and how language patterns predict variance in prejudice across a large number of minority groups. Informed by construal level theory, intergroup-contact theory, and linguistic expectancy bias, we leverage a natural language corpus of 1.8 million newspaper articles to investigate patterns of language referencing 60 U.S. minority groups. We found that perception of social distance among immigrant groups is reflected in language production: Groups perceived as socially distant (vs. close) are also more likely to be mentioned in abstract (vs. concrete) language. Concreteness was also strongly positively correlated with sentiment, a phenomenon that was unique to language concerning minority groups, suggesting a strong tendency for more socially distant groups to be represented with more negative language. We also provide a qualitative exploration of the content of outgroup prejudice by applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation to language referencing minority groups in the context of immigration. We identified 15 immigrant-related topics (e.g., politics, arts, crime, illegal workers, museums, food) and the strength of their association and relationship with perceived sentiment for each minority group. This research demonstrates how perceived social distance and language concreteness are related and correlate with outgroup negativity, provides a practical and ecologically valid method for investigating perceptions of minority groups in language, and helps elaborate the connection between theoretical positions from social psychology with recent studies from computer science on prejudice embedded in natural language.

A Rose by Any Other Verb: The Effect of Expectations and Word Category on Processing Effort in Situated Sentence Comprehension.

Recent work has shown that linguistic and visual contexts jointly modulate linguistic expectancy and, thus, the processing effort for a (more or less) expected critical word. According to these findings, uncertainty about the upcoming referent in a visually-situated sentence can be reduced by exploiting the selectional restrictions of a preceding word (e.g., a verb or an adjective), which then reduces processing effort on the critical word (e.g., a referential noun). Interestingly, however, no such modulation was observed in these studies on the expectation-generating word itself. The goal of the current study is to investigate whether the reduction of uncertainty (i.e., the generation of expectations) simply does not modulate processing effort-or whether the particular subject-verb-object (SVO) sentence structure used in these studies (which emphasizes the referential nature of the noun as direct pointer to visually co-present objects) accounts for the observed pattern. To test these questions, the current design reverses the functional roles of nouns and verbs by using sentence constructions in which the noun reduces uncertainty about upcoming verbs, and the verb provides the disambiguating and reference-resolving piece of information. Experiment 1 (a Visual World Paradigm study) and Experiment 2 (a Grammaticality Maze study) both replicate the effect found in previous work (i.e., the effect of visually-situated context on the word which uniquely identifies the referent), albeit on the verb in the current study. Results on the noun, where uncertainty is reduced and expectations are generated in the current design, were mixed and were most likely influenced by design decisions specific to each experiment. These results show that processing of the reference-resolving word—whether it be a noun or a verb—reliably benefits from the prior linguistic and visual information that lead to the generation of concrete expectations.

Communication of stereotypes in the classroom: biased language use of German and Turkish adolescents

Little is known about the linguistic transmission and maintenance of mutual stereotypes in interethnic contexts. This field study, therefore, investigated the linguistic expectancy bias (LEB) and the linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) among German and Turkish adolescents (13 to 20 years) in the school context. The LEB refers to the general phenomenon of describing stereotypes more abstractly. The LIB is the tendency to use language abstraction for in-group protective reasons. Results revealed an unmoderated LEB, whereas the LIB only occurred when foreigners were in the numerical majority, the classroom composition was perceived as a learning disadvantage, or the interethnic conflict frequency was high. These findings provide first evidence for the use of both LEB and LIB in an interethnic classroom setting.

Linguistic Biases and Persuasion in Communication About Objects

Research on language abstraction has primarily been focused on the language that is used to describe (intergroup) behaviors, while limited attention has been given to communication about objects. This article aims to fill this gap and studies biases in language abstraction in the descriptions of interactions with objects. Study 1 demonstrated a linguistic expectancy bias in this setting: People described expectancy-congruent experiences with objects more abstractly than incongruent experiences. Study 2 examined a mediator, and provides data suggesting that expectancy-congruent (vs. incongruent) experiences were more likely attributed to the object (vs. the situation/user), and this causal inference mediated the effect of expectancy-(in)congruence on language use. Study 3 examined the impact of communication goals, and found that the goal to convince a receiver of the high quality of a product (vs. no persuasion goal) led to more abstract descriptions of positive experiences with objects and to more concrete language for negative experiences.

Language Use and Stereotyping: the Role of Approach and Avoidance Motivation Goals

The use of more abstract language to describe expected behaviors as opposed to unexpected behaviors has traditionally been considered a way of stereotype maintenance. This tendency is known as linguistic expectancy bias. Two experiments examined the influence of approach and avoidance motivational orientations on the production of this linguistic expectancy bias. It was predicted that approach strategic orientation is likely to describe expectancy consistent behaviors at a higher level of linguistic abstraction than expectancy inconsistent behaviors. In contrast, avoidance strategic orientation is likely to describe both expectancy consistent behaviors and expectancy inconsistent behaviors at a lower level of linguistic abstraction, thus facilitating the disappearance of linguistic expectancy bias. Two experiments confirmed these expectations, using strategic orientation manipulations based either on communication goals or on motor action, and measuring linguistic abstraction either on forced-choice answer format or on free descriptions. Implications for the generalisation of linguistic expectancy bias are discussed.

Effects of Cerebellar Stimulation on Processing Semantic Associations

Current research in cerebellar cognitive and linguistic functions makes plausible the idea that the cerebellum is involved in processing temporally contiguous linguistic input. In order to assess this hypothesis, a lexical decision task was constructed to study the effects of cerebellar transcranial magnetic stimulation on semantic noun-to-verb priming based on association (e.g. 'soap-cleaning') or similarity (e.g. 'robbery-stealing'). The results demonstrated a selective increase in associative priming size after stimulation of a lateral cerebellar site. The findings are discussed in the contexts of a cerebellar role in linguistic expectancy generation and the corticocerebellar 'prefrontal' reciprocal loop.

Generalized event knowledge activation during online sentence comprehension

Recent research has demonstrated that knowledge of real-world events plays an important role in guiding online language comprehension. The present study addresses the scope of event knowledge activation during the course of comprehension, specifically investigating whether activation is limited to those knowledge elements that align with the local linguistic context. The present study addresses this issue by analyzing event-related brain potentials (ERPs) recorded as participants read brief scenarios describing typical real-world events. Experiment 1 demonstrates that a contextually anomalous word elicits a reduced N400 if it is generally related to the described event, even when controlling for the degree of association of this word with individual words in the preceding context and with the expected continuation. Experiment 2 shows that this effect disappears when the discourse context is removed. These findings demonstrate that during the course of incremental comprehension, comprehenders activate general knowledge about the described event, even at points at which this knowledge would constitute an anomalous continuation of the linguistic stream. Generalized event knowledge activation contributes to mental representations of described events, is immediately available to influence language processing, and likely drives linguistic expectancy generation.

Where are you from? The Effect of Regional Stereotypes on the Linguistic Expectancy Bias：Focusing on the Linguistic Category Model

본 연구는 Semin과 Fiedler(1988)가 제안한 언어 범주화 모델(LCM)을 기반으로 고정관념이 언어로써 어떻게 재현될 수 있는지 검토하였다. 이를 위해 연구 1에서는 한국어 단어들이 언어 범주화 모델에서 주창한 추상화 정도에 따른 4개 언어범주로 구분되는지를 검토하였다. 판별분석 결과 한국어 단어는 5개 평가차원에 따라 추상화 정도가 다른 4개 언어범주로 구분되었다. 연구 2에서는 연구 1의 결과를 바탕으로 대상의 고향과 행위를 스크립트로 제시하여 지역 고정관념에 따라 대상의 행위에 대한 추상화가 다른지를 검토하였다. 그 결과 참여자들은 대상의 행위가 대상의 지역(즉, 충청) 고정관념과 불일치할 때보다 일치할 때 대상의 행위를 언어적으로 추상화하여 묘사하여 가설이 부분적으로 지지되었다. 연구3에서 취업 면접 상황의 시청각 자료를 제시하여 대상의 고향을 말씨로 조작한 경우, 연구2에서와 동일한 형태의 언어적 추상화가 다시 한 번 나타났다. 참여자들은 또한 대상의 행위가 대상의 지역(즉, 서울) 고정관념과 불일치 할 때보다 일치할 때 더욱 내부귀인 하였고 채용하겠다고 응답하여 부분적으로 가설이 지지되었다. 이러한 지역고정관념에 따른 귀인과 채용의도를 언어적 추상화가 매개하는지를 검토하였으나 매개모형은 유의미하지 않았다. 이러한 결과의 이론적· 실제적 의미에 대해 논의하였다.

The Implicit Meta-Theory That Has Inspired and Restricted LCM Research

Two decades of research on the linguistic category model (LCM) have resulted in considerable empirical evidence that can be organized by distinct paradigms: the linguistic intergroup bias, the linguistic expectancy bias, the question-answering paradigm, and language-based attribution. The present article explicates the metatheory underlying the research that was actually conducted within these paradigms. This metatheory provides the organizing structure for a review of potential LCM research that has not been conducted yet because it does not fit the common metatheory. Untapped LCM research encompasses communication failures, deception, the inclusion of measures of effective communication, and the joint determination of language and cognition by social roles and ecological constraints. Because many of these often overlooked topics are theoretically important and practically useful, they suggest themselves as prominent goals of future research.

Communicating expectancies about others

The linguistic expectancy bias hypothesis predicts that, in general, person impressions are shared with others via subtle differences in the level of linguistic abstraction that is used to communicate expected and unexpected information about an individual. In a two-part communication experiment, we examined this hypothesis. In the first part of the experiment communicators were asked to provide a description of an event where a good friend had behaved in an expected or unexpected way. In the second part, recipients of these stories who were blind to the conditions under which the description was generated judged whether the story target's behavior was due to dispositional or situational factors. Behaviors in expected events were judged to be more dispositional relative to behaviors in unexpected events. As predicted, the level of linguistic abstraction mediated this effect. It is concluded that person impressions may be transmitted and formed at an interpersonal level via differential language use. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

When Do We Communicate Stereotypes? Influence of the Social Context on the Linguistic Expectancy Bias

The linguistic expectancy bias (LEB) refers to the tendency to describe expectancy consistent information at a higher level of linguistic abstraction than expectancy inconsistent information. Two experiments examined the influence of the social communicative context on the production of this linguistic bias by manipulating the group membership of the actor in, and the recipient of, stereotypical information. Results supported the prediction that an LEB effect based on stereotypes is especially pronounced in an intergroup social communicative context in which either the actor in or the recipient of the stereotypical information is an outgroup member.

Biased Language Use in Stereotype Maintenance: The Role of Encoding and Goals.

In 4 studies, the authors investigated the relative impact of biased encoding of information and communication goals on biased language use. A category label (linguistic expectancy bias, Study 1) or a group label (linguistic intergroup bias, Study 2) was presented either before or after a story that participants were asked to communicate. Biased language use only emerged when participants learned about the group membership of the actor or the category label before hearing the story. However, communication goals had an effect on language use at the retrieval stage, independent of encoding (Studies 3 and 4). Although communication goal effects seemed to overwhelm encoding effects, encoding still influenced language use under externally imposed time pressure (Study 3) and self-imposed time constraints (Study 4). This research reaffirms the importance of both cognitive and communicative processes in stereotype maintenance and highlights the conditions under which they each operate.

On the different uses of linguistic abstractness: from LIB to LEB and beyond

AbstractLinguistic abstractness has been shown to mediate persuasive and attributional effects of communication. The linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) refers to the tendency to describe positive ingroup and negative outgroup behaviors more abstractly than negative ingroup and positive outgroup behavior. Recently, the LIB was shown to reflect to a large extent a linguistic expectancy bias (LEB). Abstract language need not have an ingroup‐serving function, but may be used to communicate expected information in a concise and condensed manner. The present research shows that the reverse may also be true. When the interaction goal is not merely to convey information that is shared anyway because it is typical of the communication target but to transmit unshared information (known to the communicator but new to the recipient), then it may be necessary to express (explain, teach, interpret) unexpected ideas or deviant attitudes in abstract, interpretive terms. The joint operation of both principles was demonstrated within the same experimental task. In communications about East Germans, more abstract predicates were used in typically East German domains (LEB). However, more abstract terms were also used when messages deviated from the recipient's prior attitude. A conceptual framework is proposed to integrate these findings. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

How do we communicate stereotypes? Linguistic bases and inferential consequences.

The linguistic expectancy bias is defined as the tendency to describe expectancy-consistent information at a higher level of abstraction than expectancy-inconsistent information. The communicative consequences of this bias were examined in 3 experiments. Analyses of judgments that recipients made on the basis of linguistically biased information generated by transmitters indicated that behavior in expectancy-consistent messages was attributed more to dispositional and less to situational factors than behavior in expectancy-inconsistent messages. Moreover, this effect was mediated by the level of linguistic abstraction of the messages. These findings provide direct evidence for the hypothesis that recipients are sensitive to variations in linguistic abstraction in spontaneous language use because of stereotypes. Results are discussed with respect to the interpersonal aspects of stereotyping.

How do we communicate stereotypes? Linguistic bases and inferential consequences.

The linguistic expectancy bias is defined as the tendency to describe expectancy-consistent information at a higher level of abstraction than expectancy-inconsistent information. The communicative consequences of this bias were examined in 3 experiments. Analyses of judgments that recipients made on the basis of linguistically biased information generated by transmitters indicated that behavior in expectancy-consistent messages was attributed more to dispositional and less to situational factors than behavior in expectancy-inconsistent messages. Moreover, this effect was mediated by the level of linguistic abstraction of the messages. These findings provide direct evidence for the hypothesis that recipients are sensitive to variations in linguistic abstraction in spontaneous language use because of stereotypes. Results are discussed with respect to the interpersonal aspects of stereotyping.

Frans Artillerievuur In Kroatie

This article is a plea for more research into the interaction between linguistic expectancy and acoustic information. Even if under normal circumstances priority should be given to the acoustic signal, it is evident that linguistic expectancy is a prerequisite for understanding speech. Second language students in the Netherlands generally have a good command of the phonotactic properties of English. In developing the students' listening proficiency teachers therefore experience the law of diminishing returns if they keep focusing on phonetic and phonological properties of the foreign language. However, the students' linguistic familiarity with English may still give rise to interpretative problems. Notably collocations, false friends (faux amis), homonymy and polysemy are categories of words prone to misunderstanding. In research on listening proficiency more attention should be paid to how linguistic expectancy interacts with acoustic information in the perception of these categories of words in particular. It is demonstrated that slight uncertainty with respect to acoustic information may have disproportionate repercussions on understanding speech. A slight decrease in redundancy may make the difference between understanding everything or nothing, as the hearing-impaired are well aware. In this respect minor hearing losses - not uncommon nowadays at early ages due to overexposure to noise and loud music - may have serious effects on information processing. If reduction of redundancy results from hearing loss, there is little teachers can do to help their students improve their listening proficiency. Teachers should be aware that the inherent differences in sound perception of their students may go unnoticed in the mothertongue, but will inevitably surface in the second language, where linguistic expectancy is by definition less well developed. It would therefore seem unwise to relate listening proficiency in the native language as a test-measure to listening in the foreign language, as has been suggested by some researchers in the past.

Luisteren is Gokken

This article describes global listening strategies as a promising approach to perception. In a number of demonstrations it is shown that global specification of the acoustic signal and a global perceptual approach may be quite sufficient for adequate communication, depending on the nature of the subtle interplay between speaker and hearer. The author emphasizes that it is this interplay which eventually determines the relative contributions of acoustic information and linguistic expectancy to the process of communication. Listening proficiency in a foreign language is also discussed in this context.

Factors contributing to the recovery of monosyllabic words excerpted from natural speech

Words isolated from running speech have been found to be less intelligible than when they appear in the context of a sentence or phrase. Although auditory context, in general, provides additional information, the role of the immediately adjacent acoustic cues is unknown. In this investigation two adult males read in a comfortable manner 16 paragraphs from which a target sentence and a target word (CVC or CVCC) were excised. The words preceding and following each target word were selected so that the initial and final consonant were bounded by a shwa vowel. The intelligibility of the target word was essentially unaffected by the inclusion of the neighboring shwa vowels and only moderately increased by the inclusion of the immediately preceding and following words. Errors in intelligibility were ordered as follows: final consonant, vowel and initial consonant. It was concluded that tempo and spectral normalization, and linguistic expectancy disambiguate words which are initiated and terminated by obstruents and bounded by a vowel.

Estimation tests as a means of quantifying linguistic expectancy

Objective word counts of English and Dutch were used to carry out binary choice tests concerning frequencies of occurrence of word-initial consonant clusters. Subjects were native speakers of English or Dutch. Results indicate that subjective estimations are logarithmically related to objective data and that there is an improvement in frequency judgments with increased overall second language proficiency. Frequency estimation tests are envisaged as a means for testing second language proficiency. The degree of difficulty in estimating frequencies of clusters seems to be language specific.