scholarly journals Language does not modulate fake news credibility, but emotion does

2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 84-102
Author(s):  
María Fernández-López ◽  
Manuel Perea
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
University Students ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Direct Relationship ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Negative Emotionality ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Bayesian Analyses ◽  
News Stories ◽  
News Credibility

AbstractThe proliferation of fake news in internet requires understanding which factors modulate their credibility and take actions to limit their impact. A number of recent studies have shown an effect of the foreign language when making decisions: reading in a foreign language engages a more rational, analytic mode of thinking (Costa et al., 2014, Cognition). This analytic mode of processing may lead to a decrease in the credibility of fake news. Here we conducted two experiments to examine whether fake news stories presented to university students were more credible in the native language than in a foreign language. Bayesian analyses in both experiments offered support for the hypothesis that the credibility of fake news is not modulated by language. Critically, Experiment 2 also showed a strong direct relationship between credibility and negative emotionality regardless of language. This pattern suggests that the driving force behind the engagement in an automatic thinking mode when reading fake news is not language (native vs. foreign) but emotionality.

scholarly journals Analysis of Errors Made by Iraqi University Students in the Area of English Relativization System

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-115
Author(s):  
Abbas Naethel
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Error Analysis ◽  
University Students ◽  
Relative Clause ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Target Language ◽  
The University ◽  
Made In ◽  
Learning English

This study aims at giving an account of an analysis of errors made by Iraqi university students in the area of English Relativization system. It focuses mainly on dealing with the investigation of the syntactic errors committed by Iraqi students in English relative clause. This causes a major problem for university students learning English as a foreign language. This comes from the students' interlingual and intralingual strategies. This also indicates that the university students seem to depend on the target language (TL) system rather than on that of the native language (NL). The technique used is an error analysis which Wilkins (1972) highlights its value in giving "greater understandings of the difficulties that learners face, and will perhaps assist in the development of pedagogic strategies." (p. 206). After analyzing and interpreting the errors made in the 100 students' compositions, some recommendations are given.

scholarly journals NEGATIVE TRANSFER OF INDONESIAN COLLOCATIONS INTO ENGLISH AND IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mashadi Said
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
University Students ◽  
Empirical Analysis ◽  
Negative Transfer ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Teaching English ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Lexical Collocations ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Direct Teaching

One of the most challenging problems for EFL students is to be able to express themselves not just grammatically but also acceptably and naturally in English in appropriate contexts.  The ability to produce acceptable and natural expressions in English is closely related to the EFL students’ competence in collocation—which words go together in normal usage. The present study provides an empirical analysis on negative transfer made by Indonesian EFL students in lexical collocation and recommends practical ways to help students improve their competence in collocation.  Data for the study was collected from essays written by 40 EFL university students majoring in English in Indonesia whose native language is Indonesian. The students were asked to write a two- to three-page essay on an assigned topic. Of 445 lexical collocation errors found in the English writing, 321 (72%) were negative transfers of Indonesian lexical collocations into English. The findings suggest the necessity of direct teaching of collocations, the use of The Collins WordbanksOnline, and the need to design bilingual collocation dictionaries.<br />Keywords: Negative Transfer, Lexical Collocation, Indonesian Collocation, Acceptable Collocation<br /><br />

scholarly journals People are worse at detecting fake news in their foreign language

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafal Muda ◽  
Gordon Pennycook ◽  
Damian Pieńkosz ◽  
Michal Bialek
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Cognitive Reflection ◽  
False News

When using their foreign language, proficient Polish-English bilinguals found false news as more believable, true news as less believable, and discerned one from another less accurately. The effect cannot be attributed to greater arousal of news read in foreign vs native language nor to changes in cognitive reflection of individuals. We also found that greater cognitive reflection helps to discern true from false news because is associated with increased believability of true, but not of fake news. Consequences of our findings in the context of immigration are discussed.

Eye Movements of Children and Adults While Reading Television Subtitles

2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 196-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Géry d'Ydewalle ◽  
Wim De Bruycker
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
Information Sources ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Verbal Information ◽  
Single Text ◽  
Grade 5 ◽  
Reading Patterns ◽  
Attentional System

Abstract. Eye movements of children (Grade 5-6) and adults were monitored while they were watching a foreign language movie with either standard (foreign language soundtrack and native language subtitling) or reversed (foreign language subtitles and native language soundtrack) subtitling. With standard subtitling, reading behavior in the subtitle was observed, but there was a difference between one- and two-line subtitles. As two lines of text contain verbal information that cannot easily be inferred from the pictures on the screen, more regular reading occurred; a single text line is often redundant to the information in the picture, and accordingly less reading of one-line text was apparent. Reversed subtitling showed even more irregular reading patterns (e.g., more subtitles skipped, fewer fixations, longer latencies). No substantial age differences emerged, except that children took longer to shift attention to the subtitle at its onset, and showed longer fixations and shorter saccades in the text. On the whole, the results demonstrated the flexibility of the attentional system and its tuning to the several information sources available (image, soundtrack, and subtitles).

The Inscriptions on the Gravestones in the Croatian Villages of Slovakia, Chunovo and Jarovce: The Specificity of Mixing Graphics Systems

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 159-173
Author(s):  
Darya Yu. Vashchenko
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Close Contact ◽  
Funerary Monuments ◽  
Traditional Spelling ◽  
The Family ◽  
High Degree ◽  
The Village

The article discusses the inscriptions on funerary monuments from the Croatian villages of Cunovo and Jarovce, located in the South of Slovakia, near Bratislava. These inscriptions reflect the complicated sociocultural situation in the region, which is particularly specific due to the fact that this territory was included to Slovakia’s territory only after 1946, while earlier the village was part of Hungary. In addition, the local Croatian ethnic group was actively in close contact with the German and Hungarian communities. At the same time, the orthographic norms of the literary Croatian, German, Hungarian, and Slovak languages, which could potentially be owned by the authors of the inscriptions, differ in many ways, despite the Latin alphabet used on all the gravestones. All this is reflected in the tombstones, representing a high degree of mixing codes. The article identifies the main types of fusion on the monuments: separate orthograms, writing the maiden name of the deceased in the spelling of her native language, the traditional spelling of the family name. In addition, the mixing of codes can be associated with writing feminitives, also order of name and surname within the anthroponym. Moreover, the settlements themselves represent different ethnic groups coexistence within the village. Gravestones from the respective cemeteries also differ from each other in the nature of the prevailing trend of the mixing codes. In Jarovce, where the ethnic groups live compactly, fusion is often presented as a separate foreign language orthograms. In Cunovo, where the ethnic groups constitute a global conglomerate, more traditional presents for a specific family spelling of the names on the monument.

Can fake news really change behaviour? Evidence from a study of COVID-19 misinformation.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ciara Greene ◽  
Gillian Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Health Behaviour ◽  
Real World ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Contact Tracing ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Behavioural Intentions ◽  
The Real ◽  
News Stories

Previous research has argued that fake news may have grave consequences for health behaviour, but surprisingly, no empirical data have been provided to support this assumption. This issue takes on new urgency in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. In this large preregistered study (N = 3746) we investigated the effect of exposure to fabricated news stories about COVID-19 on related behavioural intentions. We observed small but measurable effects on some related behavioural intentions but not others – for example, participants who read a story about problems with a forthcoming contact-tracing app reported reduced willingness to download the app. We found no effects of providing a general warning about the dangers of online misinformation on response to the fake stories, regardless of the framing of the warning in positive or negative terms. We conclude with a call for more empirical research on the real-world consequences of fake news.

Translating ambiguous and nonambiguous Words in a foreign Language

2003 ◽  
Vol 139-140 ◽  
pp. 129-152
Author(s):  
Paul Bogaards ◽  
Elisabeth Van Der Linden ◽  
Lydius Nienhuis
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
University Students ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Lexical Ambiguity ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Bilingual Lexicon ◽  
The Individual

The research to be reported on in this paper was originally motivated by the finding that about 70% of the mistakes made by university students when translating from their mother tongue (Dutch) into their foreign language (French) were lexical in nature (NIENHUIS et al. 1989). This was partially confinned in the investigation described in NIENHUIS et al. (1993). A closer look at the individual errors suggested that many problems were caused by words with more than one meaning which each require different translations in the target language. In the research reported on in this paper, we checked our fmdings in the light of what is known about the structure of the bilingual lexicon and about the ways bilinguals have access to the elements of their two languages. On the basis of the model of the bilingual lexicon presented by KROLL & Sholl (1992) an adapted model is proposed for the processing of lexical ambiguity. This leads to a tentative schema of the mental activities that language learners have to perfonn when they are translating from their mother tongue into a foreign language, The second part of the paper describes two experiments we have carried out in order to find empirical support for such a schema. The last section of the paper contains a discussion of the results obtained as well as the conclusions that can be drawn.

Singular they in English as a foreign language

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Stormbom
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
University Students ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Third Person ◽  
And Gender ◽  
L1 English

AbstractA much-debated issue in English is the use of “epicene pronouns”, i.e. third-person singular pronouns of indeterminate gender. Previous studies have shown that singular they is the most common epicene in L1 English, but this pronoun has not received much attention in studies of L2 use. The present study extends previous research by examining variation between L2 groups in the distribution of epicene pronouns, focussing particularly on the use of singular they and how it is affected by three features of the antecedent: definiteness, notional number, and gender expectancy. The data originate in an elicitation experiment, which was completed by 338 university students of English from eight L1 backgrounds. The results show that singular they was most frequently used with notionally plural antecedents, whereas it was least common with gender-stereotyped antecedents. The study also disclosed variation between learners: In some L1 groups, they was used frequently with all types of antecedents, suggesting that these learners perceive singular they as a singular pronoun in its own right. In other groups, singular they appeared to function mostly as a modification of the plural they, as the pronoun was only frequent with notionally plural antecedents. The findings have important implications for language teaching.

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