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  1. Abstract Objective

    The study addressed whether specific linguistic variables used by adoptive parents were associated with ratings of the adoptee's relationship with their birth mothers.

    Background

    Parents transmit their beliefs and values to children through verbal and nonverbal communication. The ways in which adoptive parents discuss their child's adoption and birth family can influence the child's adoptive identity development and satisfaction with their adoption arrangements.

    Method

    Participants included mothers, fathers, and adolescents (M age = 15.7 years) in 177 adoptive families of children who were adopted domestically as infants by same‐race parents. The Linguistic Analysis and Word Count 2015 (LIWC2015) program was used to code adoptive parents' interviews regarding their thoughts and feelings about adoption and their child's birth family. Adolescents' views of birth mothers were coded from their interviews.

    Results

    There were significant differences in linguistic patterns when adoptive parents discussed adoption generally compared to when they discussed their child's birth family. Specific linguistic variables used by adoptive mothers and fathers were significantly associated with adopted adolescents' perceptions and feelings towards their birth mothers.

     
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  2. Abstract

    This article analyzes how trained and certified interpreters navigate ideologies about language interpreting, neutrality, and fairness in a California child welfare court. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork between 2016 and 2018, this analysis demonstrates how trained and certified court interpreters, as well as the attorneys, judges, and social workers with whom they work, distinguish between “off‐the‐record” and “on‐the‐record” legal interactions through shifting demands on interpreters’ labor. The metapragmatic distinctions that court professionals make about interpreting inform practices of interpreting, generate requests for additional forms of ad‐hoc interpreter assistance, and contribute to discourses of linguistic sympathy that center interpreters as central to addressing instances of language marginalization in legal settings. In a court where more than half of the open cases routinely involve Spanish‐dominant parents, interpreters and court professionals depend on court interpreters’ off‐the‐record assistance to meet case‐management goals. However, these metapragmatic distinctions and interpreters’ discourses of linguistic sympathy do little to interrupt systemic forms of marginalization that are reproduced in legal settings. This analysis contributes to theorizations of the interplay of discourses of affective and linguistic labor with institutional goals, as well as of how language ideologies shape interpreters’ social role in legal settings, undermining access to law.

     
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  3. Indigenous education increasingly seeks to reclaim the institutions of state assimilation as spaces for the dissemination and support of localized forms of knowledge and language use and the valorization of alternative citizenship identities. In this study, I compare two schools in Ecuador to show how divergent ways of teaching Kichwa promote or reject state policies of language standardization and the kinds of citizens foregrounded by them. By comparing the schools’ approaches to teaching Kichwa, I call attention to linguistic registers as they carry out or contest predominant forms of citizenship. These examples provide a pathway to study inclusive language policies and classrooms and to understand the multiplicity of ways that citizenship manifestsin communication.

     
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  4. In this commentary I provide a review of the microaggression construct within a linguistic-pragmatic framework. From this perspective, microaggressions can be viewed as nonconventional indirect speech acts, that is, utterances that, because of their aggressive meaning, require some type of inferential processing on the part of the hearer. This inferential process requires a consideration of the remark in the context within which it occurs, including the prior discourse, as well as the roles and statuses of the interactants. Because microaggressions are indirect, the speaker always has the option, especially if they are higher in power, of denying any aggressive meaning. Focusing on their linguistic/pragmatic features allows for the development of a more principled framework for specifying what constitutes a microaggression, as well as helping to identify the relevant features of the context and the processes involved in the recognition of microaggressions.

     
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  5. In this commentary I provide a review of the microaggression construct within a linguistic-pragmatic framework. From this perspective, microaggressions can be viewed as nonconventional indirect speech acts, that is, utterances that, because of their aggressive meaning, require some type of inferential processing on the part of the hearer. This inferential process requires a consideration of the remark in the context within which it occurs, including the prior discourse, as well as the roles and statuses of the interactants. Because microaggressions are indirect, the speaker always has the option, especially if they are higher in power, of denying any aggressive meaning. Focusing on their linguistic/pragmatic features allows for the development of a more principled framework for specifying what constitutes a microaggression, as well as helping to identify the relevant features of the context and the processes involved in the recognition of microaggressions. 
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  6. Abstract

    While natural languages differ widely in both canonical word order and word order flexibility, their word orders still follow shared cross-linguistic statistical patterns, often attributed to functional pressures. In the effort to identify these pressures, prior work has compared real and counterfactual word orders. Yet one functional pressure has been overlooked in such investigations: The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis, which holds that information should be spread evenly throughout an utterance. Here, we ask whether a pressure for UID may have influenced word order patterns cross-linguistically. To this end, we use computational models to test whether real orders lead to greater information uniformity than counterfactual orders. In our empirical study of 10 typologically diverse languages, we find that: (i) among SVO languages, real word orders consistently have greater uniformity than reverse word orders, and (ii) only linguistically implausible counterfactual orders consistently exceed the uniformity of real orders. These findings are compatible with a pressure for information uniformity in the development and usage of natural languages.1

     
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  7. A major goal of psycholinguistic theory is to account for the cognitive constraints limiting the speed and ease of language comprehension and production. Wide-ranging evidence demonstrates a key role for linguistic expectations: A word’s predictability, as measured by the information-theoretic quantity of surprisal, is a major determinant of processing difficulty. But surprisal, under standard theories, fails to predict the difficulty profile of an important class of linguistic patterns: the nested hierarchical structures made possible by recursion in human language. These nested structures are better accounted for by psycholinguistic theories of constrained working memory capacity. However, progress on theory unifying expectation-based and memory-based accounts has been limited. Here we present a unified theory of a rational trade-off between precision of memory representations with ease of prediction, a scaled-up computational implementation using contemporary machine learning methods, and experimental evidence in support of the theory’s distinctive predictions. We show that the theory makes nuanced and distinctive predictions for difficulty patterns in nested recursive structures predicted by neither expectation-based nor memory-based theories alone. These predictions are confirmed 1) in two language comprehension experiments in English, and 2) in sentence completions in English, Spanish, and German. More generally, our framework offers computationally explicit theory and methods for understanding how memory constraints and prediction interact in human language comprehension and production. 
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  8. Lischka, A. E. ; Dyer, E. B. ; Jones, R. S. ; Lovett, J. ; Strayer, J. ; Drown, S (Ed.)
    Research processes are often messy and include tensions that are unnamed in the final products. In our attempt to update and generalize a framework used to examine teachers’ support for collective argumentation in mathematics education classrooms to examining teachers’ work in interdisciplinary STEM contexts, we have experienced significant linguistic tensions because of the context-dependent nature of language. We aim to acknowledge the difficulty of generalizing research beyond the mathematics education community, describe our attempts to resolve the problem we face, and discuss potential conclusions pertaining to the feasibility of generalizing frameworks beyond mathematics education. 
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  9. Customers are rapidly turning to social media for customer support. While brand agents on these platforms are motivated and well-intentioned to help and engage with customers, their efforts are often ignored if their initial response to the customer does not match a specific tone, style, or topic the customer is aiming to receive. The length of a conversation can reflect the effort and quality of the initial response made by a brand toward collaborating and helping consumers, even when the overall sentiment of the conversation might not be very positive. Thus, through this study, we aim to bridge this critical gap in the existing literature by analyzing language’s content and stylistic aspects such as expressed empathy, psycho-linguistic features, dialogue tags, and metrics for quantifying personalization of the utterances that can influence the engagement of an interaction. This paper demonstrates that we can predict engagement using initial customer and brand posts. 
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  10. E-healthcare has been envisaged as a major component of the infrastructure of modern healthcare, and has been developing rapidly in China. For healthcare, news media can play an important role in raising public interest and utilization of a particular service and complicating (and, perhaps clouding) debate on public health policy issues. We conducted a linguistic analysis of news reports from January 2015 to June 2021 related to E-healthcare in mainland China, using a heterogeneous graphical modeling approach. This approach can simultaneously cluster the datasets and estimate the conditional dependence relationships of keywords. It was found that there were eight phases of media coverage. The focuses and main topics of media coverage were extracted based on the network hub and module detection. The temporal patterns of media reports were found to be mostly consistent with the policy trend. Specifically, in the policy embryonic period (2015–2016), two phases were obtained, industry management was the main topic, and policy and regulation were the focuses of media coverage. In the policy development period (2017–2019), four phases were discovered. All the four main topics, namely industry development, health care, financial market, and industry management, were present. In 2017 Q3–2017 Q4, the major focuses of media coverage included social security, healthcare and reform, and others. In 2018 Q1, industry regulation and finance became the focuses. In the policy outbreak period (2020–), two phases were discovered. Financial market and industry management were the main topics. Medical insurance and healthcare for the elderly became the focuses. This analysis can offer insights into how the media responds to public policy for E-healthcare, which can be valuable for the government, public health practitioners, health care industry investors, and others. 
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