The interface of emotion and cognition in language learning and use (L1, L2, Lx)

A Chinese proverb states that "The tongue can paint what the eyes can't see". Indeed,  the power of our voice should not be underestimated. The way we speak signals to others how we feel or how we think about something: a confident "yes" in response to a marriage proposal conveys assurance that the person will want to spend the rest of their life with the proposer. A weakly expressed "I'm fine" when being asked how you are, leaves a degree of uncertainty to whether you really speak the truth. In this talk, I will present data on how our voice leaks emotional, motivational, and attitudinal information (or "social prosody"). I will refer to work looking at acoustic correlates of social prosody, how easy or difficult it is to recognise emotions, attitudes and motivation from speech, how emotional voices impact behaviour and well-being, and what factors (incl. culture) can influence these processes. I will also show some electro-physiological data from listeners in response to emotional and motivational speech to shed light on the question of how the brain manages to successfully detect how others feel or try to energise you to action.

This talk details the findings of a recent study (McKenzie & Carrie, 2018; McKenzie & McNeil, under contract) employing instruments adapted from Social Psychology - an Implicit Association Test (IAT) and self-report attitude scale - to measure the relationship between 90 Newcastle-based English nationals' implicit and explicit ratings of Northern English and Southern English speech. Multivariate analysis demonstrated a significant implicit-explicit attitude discrepancy (IED), providing evidence of language attitude change in progress (Charlesworth & Banaji, 2019), led by younger females, with explicit attitudes changing more rapidly towards a greater tolerance, if not unreserved approval, of forms of English spoken in the north of England. The study findings are discussed in relation to the potential changing status of Northern and Southern English speech in the north of England. Further discussion is offered with regard to the potential benefits of employing implicit and explicit attitude measures to investigate more deeply embedded linguistic prejudice and, relatedly, to help determine any language attitude change and micro-level language change underway within specific communities.

Bibliography:

Charlesworth, T.E.S. and M.R. Banaji (2019) Patterns of implicit and explicit attitudes: 1. Long-termchange and stability from 2007 to 2016. Psychological Science 30(2): 830-844.

McKenzie, R.M. and E. Carrie (2018) Implicit-explicit attitudinal discrepancy and the investigation of language attitude change in progress. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 39(9): 174-192.

McKenzie, R.M., & McNeil, A. (under contract). Implicit and explicit language attitudes: Mapping accent discrimination and attitude change in England. London: Routledge.
* The financial support provided by a 12-month British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship awarded to Robert McKenzie (Reference: MD20\200009) to fund this study is gratefully acknowledged.

Foreign and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research has long been dominated by a cognitive perspective that views language learning and teaching as resulting from an interaction of learner-internal variables such as aptitude, working memory, musical ability, and teaching strategies (focus on form, recasts, communicative approach). The cognitive approach assumes that physiology plays a central role in SLA (Sharwood Smith, 2017) and it leaves little place to the role of emotions, and their unpredictable effects. The situation started changing around 2010 when SLA researchers became increasingly interested in the role of various emotions in SLA  (Dewaele et al., 2019) and how they fuelled learners’ progress and performance in the L2. As a result, a more nuanced understanding is emerging of the highly dynamic interactions between learner cognition and emotions in the classroom, interacting with a wide range of learner-internal and learner-external variables.

Bibliography:

Dewaele, J.-M., Chen, X., Padilla, A.M., & Lake, J. (2019). The flowering of positive psychology in foreign language teaching and acquisition research. Frontiers in Psychology. Language Sciences 10, 2128. Doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02128

Sharwood Smith, M. (2017). Introducing Language and Cognition. A Map of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.