Study: Bilingual Mandarin Speakers Repress Negative Words in English
A new research study revealed that a bilingual study group did not respond to negative words in English charged with potentially disturbing emotions.
According to the study conducted with bilingual Mandarin-English speakers, words such as “anger” in the non-native language were not assimilated in the same way as words with no emotions attached to them, such as the word “position.” This may mean that our brain can unconsciously process meaning of words, while consciously eliminating some information.
Study researcher Yanjing Wu, a psychologist at Bangor University in the United Kingdom, stated:
“We devised this experiment to unravel the unconscious interactions between the processing of emotional content and access to the native language system. We think we’ve identified, for the first time, the mechanism by which emotion controls fundamental thought processes outside consciousness. Perhaps this is a process that resembles the mental repression mechanism that people have theorized about but never previously located.”
The findings include the fact that when using their second language, bilinguals have a much less emotional response. And that was the case of swear words and usually awkward topics in English for the Mandarin speakers.
Wu and his colleague, Guillaume Thierry, recruited 15 native English speakers, 15 native Chinese speakers, and 15 native Chinese speakers who were also fluent in English, all of them with English knowledge sinc 12 years of age. Study subjects saw word pairs on a screen, being one of the words neutral, while the other variable between positive, negative, or neutral. The first syllable of each word at each pair of words was chosen with the intention to sound the same in Mandarin compared to its counterpart. Negative words, such as failure, war, discomfort and unfortunate, were chosen for the pairs. Every time the words had some connection meaning-wise (and in fact, some of them were), participants were requested to press a button. Electrodes were attached to the scalps of study subjects to measure the electrical response in the brain when they were confronted with the pairs.
Findings were that the bilingual subjects, without knowing, were translating the positive and neutral words into Mandarin, but they did not show the same response when reading negative words. Thierry stated that he was extremely surprised by their finding and that they expected to find a heightened reaction to the emotional word but what they found was the complete opposite — “a cancellation of the response to the negative words.”
The reason why the brain acts this way is not yet clear, but the researchers suspect it is a protective mechanism. Thierry adds:
“We know that in trauma, for example, people behave very differently. Surface conscious processes are modulated by a deeper emotional system in the brain. Perhaps this brain mechanism spontaneously minimizes negative impact of disturbing emotional content on our thinking, to prevent causing anxiety or mental discomfort.”
Source: voxy.com
Train your English watching the videoclip “TV has gone to the dogs” and reading the transcript below!
TRANSCRIPT
REPORTER: Sport …outdoor adventure - it’s a new TV channel and it’s just for dogs. Dog TV’s creators say the channel entertains canines when their humans are at work. Dr. Nicholas Dodman explains.
DR. NICHOLAS DODMAN, DIRECTOR OF ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR, TUFTS UNIVERSITY CUMMINGS SCHOOL OF VETERINARY MEDICINE: “There are numerous dogs, 80 million in the United States, many of whom are spending long hours alone, up to and even more than eight hours a day. And in that vacuum, devoid of human company, they have pretty much nothing to do.”
REPORTER: Dodman says sound, colors and content are especially tailored for dogs.
DR. DODMAN: “We know that dogs are kind of red-green color blind. So the colors have been adjusted and augmented. Auditorily, we know that they appreciate more melodic sounds and music. And content, we know they like looking at other dogs. They like looking at people. They like motion, like balls being kicked around, frisbees and stuff.”
REPORTER: Dog TV claims it can reduce your best friend’s angst and relax them. Dodman says about 15 percent of dogs in the U.S. show signs of clinical separation anxiety.
DR DODMAN: “The cardinal signs being vocalization and destructive behavior. You often don’t know about vocalization until a neighbor reports your dog barking or disturbing them and howling and otherwise. And then destruction, sometimes clawing at the back of a door or microblind, other times chewing on pillows or entering trash cans. So these are clinical separation anxiety cases.”
REPORTER: Dog TV streams from its website and also has plans to broadcast nationwide. Making millions of dogs jump for joy. Tara Cleary, Reuters.
COMMENTS
1. No, it’s not April 1st. Dog TV really exists—just check out their website.
2. Cat lovers may be wondering if there’s a channel for moggies. Well, not yet (it’s only a matter of time), but you can buy DVDs for cats to watch.
IDIOM
Note the punning title of this report. If you say that something has gone to the dogs, you mean that it has become weaker and worse in quality. • The country is going - or indeed, has already gone - to the dogs, and there’s probably nothing we can do about it.
Source: englishblog.com
“So many languages in the world, and a smile speaks them all.”
Source: snow-cone
FREE LESSON: “Can you maybe shed a little light on this?”
Can you (do something)?
You’re in a meeting at work. You’re leading a discussion about a project which isn’t going well. You don’t know what’s wrong with the project, so you want to ask one of the people who’s working on it.
Nelly, can you maybe shed a little light on this?
This is a way to ask someone to do something. It’s appropriate for a boss to use with the people who work for him or her. It’s more direct than asking “Could you…”
Sometimes a person will include “maybe” in this question:
Can you maybe call him and tell him to meet us there?
Can you maybe turn the volume down just a little?
Shed light on (a topic)
The phrase “shed light on ___” means to explain or give information about something that people don’t know much about.
For example, if there’s something broken in your house and you think that your children may have caused it, you can ask them:
The lamp seems to be broken. Can anyone shed some light on what happened?
News stories often use this expression in headlines. For example:
Testimony sheds light on politician’s shady dealings
This means that the things that people have said in court (“testimony”) has shown some of the dishonest (“shady) things that the politician did.
This
When people are discussing a problem or situation, they commonly refer to it as “this”:
What are we going to do about this?
How long do you think this is going to last?
Brought to you by our friends at:
Source: voxy.com
Source: supertrolled
Is Language More than a ‘Tool’ to Communicate?
We have been conditioned to think that language is only a tool we use to describe and communicate the world around us, and you can use many different tools (languages) to describe only one world. But does the world change in accordance with the ‘tool’ you use?
That’s an interesting topic brought up by a study published in 2007 by Jonathan Winawer (MIT) et al. Such study involved a group with native English speakers and a separate group with native Russian speakers. They were presented with blue squares that differed in shades from light to dark blue, with one of them being used as the main matching reference to the others, just like shown in the main picture of this article. When prompted, participants had to quickly choose which shade of blue matched the reference square. Seems very easy, doesn’t it? Well, one fact worth mentioning is that, in Russian, light blue and dark blue are actually considered to be two totally different colors, with two completely different names (lighter blues are “goluboy” and darker blues are “siniy”), much like if you were to compare orange to red.
As you would expect, Russian speakers found it very easy to distinguish between light blue and dark blue and were faster than English speakers when doing so. English speakers treated comparisons between different color categories (shades of light and dark blues) and comparisons between same color categories (shades of light blues only/ shades of dark blues only) with the same level of difficult, while Russian speakers showed some advantage in the first type of comparison. Even though language was a determinant factor, the study did not involve language at all. We can also generalize it and say that the way people use language determines how they perceive the world and changes their conscious.
Subjects were additionally analyzed for their ability to perform the same task described above with an extra distraction of silently rehearsing an specific string of numbers, such as “1,8,6,7,2,5,4…” As such a task demands linguistic attention from the individual (digit strings are not easily memorized without linguistic help, hence the way we memorize telephone numbers), the advantage shown in the first trial was not mirrored on the second one. A third control trial was performed to make sure that this effect was not only caused by “having to do two things at the same time,” but rather caused by the fact that these two tasks mentioned above overlap linguistically.
This study suggests that, after all, language may not only be treated simply as a code or a tag we put on elements and established concepts. Language may also create these elements and establish itself new concepts and how Humans perceive them. It may also serve as an explanation of why there are so many untranslatable expressions between languages.
Source: voxy.com
Cómo conseguir 5270 likes en tu facebook en solo 2 pasos!
Source: idiotsonfb
You think YOU are excited about “The Avengers”? Meet your competition! How do you say “ES uña/PT unha” in English? Reply to this and we will answer you!
Babies and Phoneme Filtering
Did you know that babies are able to recognize and process sounds related to language from a very early age? Infants seem to respond to sounds produced by their mother while still in the uterus. This auditory system is not fully developed at birth but is ready to function. Neonates are able to discriminate between the different sound levels and duration, different phonemes and constants of all the languages they are exposed to. However when they turn 12 months of age this ability disappears and they are only able to discriminate the phonemes of their native language. This phenomenon is explained through Jusczyk’s Head Turn Experiment.
Jusczyk tested two groups of American babies aged 6 months and 9 months. The experiment recorded how long the baby looked at either the right or the left speaker when listening to a word list in either English or Dutch. The result showed that the 9-month-old babies preferred the English list and the 6-month-old babies had no preference. Next the same word lists were passed through a low-pass filter to only let the low frequencies out. This resulted in the both groups showing no preference. This concludes that 9-month-old babies are aware of the phonemes in their own language as they start to use both prosodic and phonotactic cues to discriminate individual speech sounds of their language.
Why do the 6-month-old babies have no preference? Jusczyk changed the word lists to English and Norwegian because Dutch and English have the same prosodic pattern, whereas English and Norwegian do not. The results were that with or without a low-pass filter, the 6-month-old babies preferred the English list. Conclusion; 6-month-old babies are not aware of sound sequences but can discriminate different prosodic patterns and prefer their own languages pattern. The reason could be the belief that babies at birth hear at a low frequency because the middle ear is still filled with fluid and so cannot differentiate different speech sounds.
There is a vast difference seen in the auditory sensory abilities of an infant aged 6 months and a child aged 12 months. From being able to discriminate different prosodic patterns in different languages to being able to differentiate the different phonemes, eventually children reaching one year of age become better at discerning phonemes in their native language and poor at other languages. For example, Japanese speaking adults cannot discriminate the English sounds of ‘la’ and ‘ra’, whereas English speaking adults have no problem and English speaking adults cannot discriminate the Japanese sounds ‘i’ and ‘ii’, whereas Japanese adults can. However these sounds and sounds from other languages such as the Hindi ‘da’ and ‘da’ can be discriminated by an infant in the first few months after birth. In the end, infants lose this ability to start to develop language and speech as they start to form concepts and begin categorising speech in their native language.
Source: voxy.com
CAN STEVE DANCE?
a. Yes
b. Yes, he could be the next Black Ostrich
c. No
d. Seriously, No.
Source: tout.com
