Applied Languages

Students everywhere will be turning green with envy when they hear how one Birmingham graduate successfully passed her PhD. For Dr Caroline Tagg, aged 33, has become the first person in Britain to produce an 80,000 word thesis on text messaging.

The University of Birmingham student spent the last three years analysing the use of phrases like “c u in a bit” or “wot r u up 2?” to prove just frequently such words appear in text chat and how the medium has become a language in itself.

She recruited a small army of texters who sent and recorded 11,000 messages, which were then put through a computer programme that identified words used most often. “People have different abbreviations of words that the computer programme did not recognise as unique, such as the letter ‘u’ being used to represent the word ‘you’.

“But, my work is different to existing research as I explored the occurrence of everyday speech-like creativity. The use of language is different in different situations, for instance, words used in an email would be different to those used in a newspaper or in a conversation. What I found was that texting is like a language in itself, with people using a mixture of spoken and written language.”

She discovered that people text in the same way as if they were talking, using unnecessary words such as ‘oh’, ‘erm’ and often use grammatical abbreviations like ‘dunno’. “I saw these in a lot of messages,” she said. “People deliberately use words like this when they don’t need to.”

Caroline said the average text contains 17.5 words. And she discovered from her 80,000 word thesis that there is more to texting that just abbreviations – something most people associate with texting. “Actually, not many people use abbreviations,” she said. “People use playful manipulation and metaphors. It is a playful language. Not only are they quite creative, it is also quite expressive. “It was interesting to be able to research a number of linguistic methods and frameworks and apply them to the text message, because the text messages were quite fun.”

Caroline, who is due to start work as a lecturer of English Studies and Applied Linguistics for the Open University, said she plans to continue her research, specifically looking at the texts of teenagers aged 16-18 or in other forms of computer communication like social networking.
Tutor Professor Sue Hunston – who admits she can’t text – said: “Every stage of the English language has been studied. Now Caroline has studied its use in texts.”

Read more: Birmingham Mail.net

People from East Asia tend to have a tougher time than those from European countries telling the difference between a face that looks fearful versus surprised, disgusted versus angry, and now a new report published online on August 13th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, explains why. Rather than scanning evenly across a face as Westerners do, Easterners fixate their attention on the eyes.

“We show that Easterners and Westerners look at different face features to read facial expressions,” said Rachael E. Jack of The University of Glasgow. “Westerners look at the eyes and the mouth in equal measure, whereas Easterners favour the eyes and neglect the mouth. This means that Easterners have difficulty distinguishing facial expressions that look similar around the eye region.”

The discovery shows that human communication of emotion is a lot more complex than experts had believed, according to the researchers led by Roberto Caldara at The University of Glasgow. As a result, facial expressions that had been considered universally recognizable cannot be used to reliably convey emotion in cross-cultural situations.

The researchers studied cultural differences in the recognition of facial expressions by recording the eye movements of 13 Western Caucasian and 13 East Asian people while they observed pictures of expressive faces and put them into categories: happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, angry, or neutral. The faces were standardized according to the so-called Facial Action Coding System (FACS) such that each expression displayed a specific combination of facial muscles typically associated with each feeling of emotion. They then compared how accurately participants read those facial expressions using their particular eye movement strategies.

It turned out that Easterners focused much greater attention on the eyes and made significantly more errors than Westerners did. The cultural specificity in eye movements that they show is probably a reflection of cultural specificity in facial expressions, Jack said. Their data suggest that while Westerners use the whole face to convey emotion, Easterners use the eyes more and mouth less.

A survey of Eastern versus Western emoticons certainly supports that idea. “Emoticons are used to convey different emotions in cyberspace as they are the iconic representation of facial expressions,” Jack said. “Interestingly, there are clear cultural differences in the formations of these icons.” Western emoticons primarily use the mouth to convey emotional states, e.g. : ) for happy and : ( for sad, she noted, whereas Eastern emoticons use the eyes, e.g. ^.^ for happy and ;_; for sad.

“In sum,” the researchers wrote, “our data demonstrate genuine perceptual differences between Western Caucasian and East Asian observers and show that FACS-coded facial expressions are not universal signals of human emotion. From here on, examining how the different facets of cultural ideologies and concepts have diversified these basic social skills will elevate knowledge of human emotion processing from a reductionist to a more authentic representation. Otherwise, when it comes to communicating emotions across cultures, Easterners and Westerners will find themselves lost in translation.”

Read more: Science Daily