2019

An Introduction to Our Study

In an increasingly digital world where technological literacy has become a necessary skill, emojis have become an invaluable aspect of digital communication in the twenty-first century. This study seeks to understand the ways in which we use emojis in the context of iconographetic communication in our day-to-day lives (Siever, 2019). From one-on-one conversations with a close friend via text, to an open-ended public conversation initiated by a single Tweet, our team wanted to measure and observe intra-user variation in public versus private spheres. In doing so, we hoped to see the motivations, methods, and reasoning behind the use—or omission—of specific kinds of emojis in daily digital interactions. These practices are especially prevalent in individuals born from the years of 1995 to 2009, known as Generation Z. These individuals have grown up in the age of the smartphone, and play a crucial role in the dynamic nature of online trends. In analyzing high-school to college-aged Gen Z social media users, we hoped to get a look into the linguistic influences of the demographic at the forefront of digital branding.

A particularly interesting element of more public platforms such as Instagram and Twitter is the way in which the user is forced to find a balance between achieving mass appeal and maintaining some semblance of individuality and authentic self-expression. This results in versatile social media users who are skilled at accommodation to a wide audience while also creating and presenting a distinct online persona. By comparing and contrasting the patterns in emoji frequency and usage between platforms, we wanted to see how a public or private audience ultimately impacted the speaker’s choices. As the first study of its kind, we hoped to gain insight into the unspoken common practices that govern digital communication.

Understanding Iconographetic Communication & Gen Z

Utilizing the term coined by Christina Margrit Siever, we focused our study on instances of iconographetic communication (2019) among high school to college-aged social media users of Gen Z; in doing so, we were hoping to find trends in the digital communication practices of this demographic. On average, each member of Generation Z is exposed to thirteen hours of media a day, producing individuals who are “highly creative, constantly adaptive, and have a highly marketable digital mindset” (Vitalar, 2019). In tracing these users’ patterns of usage across SMS, Instagram, and Twitter, we were expecting to see some form of intra-speaker variation, with emojis used as sociolinguistic markers (Van Herk, 2018, p. 54, 120). This means that each individual would use emojis differently from platform to platform, subtly tailoring their specific iconographetic communication methods to fit their public or private sphere. Examples would include the use of certain prestige forms or targeted rhetoric, as well as the use of emojis for stylistics and aesthetics to create and promote a specific brand. Studies have shown that social media influencers use emojis as a means of adding appeal, enhancing and amplifying persuasive content, and encapsulating emotional appeals through marketing rhetoric (Ge & Gretzel, 2018). Tactics such as these are key for maintaining user engagement, which is an integral part of the social media experience for regular users as well.

Siever’s iconographetic communication model was crucial to this study because it gave us a framework for viewing the ways in which emojis are used in communication. With “icono” derived from the Greek for “image” and “graphic” derived from the Greek for “writing,” iconographetic is a catch-all term that combines pictoral and typed characters and gives context to the unique linguistic function of emojis as typed images that convey sentiments worth a thousand words. Figure 1 shows Siever’s model in its entirety, with iconographetic communication branching into its modal and referential functions. The modal function describes an emoji’s ability to complement and modify written messages, while the referential function is used when an emoji replaces words or parts of words as an extension of the linguistic proposition (Siever, 2019, p. 130, 137). When coming up with our digital survey, we tailored our questions to fit either the modal or referential function, and also used this model in analyzing actual texts, Instagram posts, and Tweets submitted by one of our participants.

How We Conducted Our Study

To conduct this research, our team used a mixed methods approach by collecting and analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data. We began our data collection by sending out a Google survey to forty-eight participants between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four. The survey consisted of three sets of questions regarding personal emoji usage within text messaging, Instagram, and Twitter. All participants were required to answer the text messaging portion first, then could choose to take either the Instagram or Twitter section—or both—depending on their personal usage habits. As seen on the right in Figure 2, our quantitative data was drawn from Likert scale questions on a scale from 1 to 5 (Likert, 1932, p.17), allowing us to create visualizations such as graphs and charts that helped us recognize emoji usage patterns. For qualitative data, we included short answer questions, as seen in the “short answer text” options of  Figure 2, allowing for individualized feedback. We then analyzed the information we received from these qualitative responses to pick out the themes and patterns we found amongst our participants. Utilizing Siever’s iconographetic communication model (2019), we analyzed both types of data with the objective of finding the differences in the way people use emojis to communicate meaning across different digital platforms.

What We Found

Taking a look at the results of the survey, the data showed that the majority of participants agreed that they use emojis differently in when texting versus social media (Figure 3). One person said, “On social media I try to keep it more trim and professional, to an extent, whereas with texting I’m more casual, so I use more emojis.” The majority also agreed that there were some unspoken rules about how emojis should be used within text messaging. When asked what some of those rules might be, another person said “Using emojis to convey tone of voice or mood of the conversation (e.g., hey 👋 vs. hey 😏).” Further proving our hypothesis specific to text messaging habits, we saw that a total of 81.3% of participants use 1 or more emojis per text, 79.5% per Instagram post, and 70% per tweet on average. This proves our hypothesis that private platforms have more frequent usage than public ones.

As for the social media portion, users of Instagram and Twitter agreed once again that their emoji use differed compared to texting (Figures 4 and 5). Some of the Instagram respondents said: “I use emojis mainly for aesthetic purposes for Instagram” and “You’re more conscious of how everyone else will perceive what you post instead of just one person.” About one third of respondents agreed on the existence of rules for using emojis in Instagram captions. Responses about unspoken rules varied and were dependent on each individual’s personal preference and self-expression.

Similarly, many Twitter participants claimed to use emojis differently because within this platform, more people would be seeing their Tweets. However, almost half of the respondents did not believe there are unspoken rules for emoji usage within this platform (Figure 5). This may be due to the lack of respondents to the Twitter portion of the survey, which could have skewed our data. Nonetheless, this supports our idea that there is more structure and hidden rules to emoji usages within private communication than there is within public communication. Our hypothesis about aesthetic and decorative usage in public spheres was also proven correct. As seen in Figure 6, only 16.7% of participants said that they use decorative emojis in their texts, while Instagram and Twitter users use decorative emojis nearly twice as much (40.9% and 31.6%, respectively).

Figure 6. Survey responses regarding aesthetic/decorative use of emojis.To see which emojis are most common, we asked participants to list up to 10 of their most frequently used emojis. The laughing/crying emoji held the #1 spot across all three, but the rest of the rankings varied (Figure 7). This leads us to believe that the laughing/crying emoji expresses universal sentiments that are socially acceptable across all platforms, both public and private. Interestingly, the sideways glancing eyes emoji and fire emoji appeared in both Instagram and Twitter data, but not in the text messaging data. This implies the existence of standard forms for public platforms to express emotions specific to Twitter/Instagram culture.

This might have something to do with meme culture specifically, as these memes are often used to express sarcasm or a certain aesthetic online.

Lastly, we asked one participant who uses Twitter, Instagram, and text to provide us with screenshots of her personal emoji usage. We took these and compared each example of emoji use with the functions on Siever’s model (Figure 1). On the left of Figure 8, the emojis convey emotion to complement the content of her text. This is likely propositional attitude under modal function because the emojis add comment and evaluation to her stat‍ement. Also in Figure 8, ✨ is used to add aesthetic/decoration to text (modal function). Figure 9 shows an example of the much less common referential function, where an emoji takes the place of an entire part. Here, 🍜 replaces the word “ramen” in the sentence.

Overall

The results from our survey support our hypothesis partially. The findings demonstrate that there is a difference in emoji usage between public and private forms of communication, as we had originally predicted. However, we found that there are more unspoken rules and structure with the usage of emojis when they are being used through private communication such as text messaging. We believe this is because the personal nature of text messages makes the user feel pressured to put more thought into the messages their emojis might send. Interestingly, our participants also indicated that they are more comfortable using emojis through text messages since they are not out for the whole world to see; this explains the higher frequency of emoji usage through text. Therefore, it appears that users are more comfortable using more emojis over text once they make sure they are using them in a way that ensures their message will be construed correctly. In contrast, on more public platforms, users choose to use more general emojis for descriptive or aesthetic purposes, with less frequent usage overall.

 

References

Bell, A. (1984). Language style as audience design. Language in Society, 13(2), 145–204.

Ge, J., & Gretzel, U. (2018). Emoji rhetoric: a social media influencer perspective. Journal of Marketing Management, 34(15-16), 1272–1295.

Herk, G. V. (2018). What is sociolinguistics? Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Likert, R. (1932). A technique for the measurement of attitudes. Archives of Psychology, 22(140), 5–55.

Siever, C. M. (2019). ‘Iconographetic Communication’ in Digital Media. Emoticons, Kaomoji, and Emoji, 127–147.

Vitelar, A. (2019). Like Me: Generation Z and the Use of Social Media for Personal Branding. Management Dynamics in the Knowledge Economy, 7(2), 257–268. doi: 10.25019/MDKE/7.2.07

Introduction

Children watch more television than ever. With new reports suggesting that children ages 2-5 spend up to 32 hours a week in front of a screen (Debczak, 2019), it only makes sense that television would have some effect on language development for these young minds. The “Peppa Pig Effect” recently made news when American parents found their children who watch the show speaking with a slight British accent and using certain British English terms (Debczak 2019). Sociolinguistically, as we are building our own identity, we are often influenced by the people around us. Ultimately, we learn how to express ourselves in order to fit in with those we like and aspire to be like (Podesva, 2011). The children watching television do the same by emulating the speech of characters from the shows they often enjoy, like Peppa Pig.

See also: “Peppa Pig Is Corrupting America’s Youth” jokingly rants Stephen Colbert

While television is often cast in a negative light in child development, television may actually present a good opportunity to play a positive role in a child’s language development– particularly through a program’s use of Child-Directed Speech paired with high-quality nurturing language-development activities. Since television is a presence in many children’s daily lives, it is essential that we explore the qualities of a well-done implementation of Child-Directed Speech (CDS) in children’s television to simultaneously engage the viewer and encourage language development. By evaluating Sesame Street’s use of Child-Directed Speech, we hope to find out whether the show exhibits the traits of a program that would be successful in aiding child language development.

Background Information

Created in 1969 by former documentarian Joan Ganz Cooney, Sesame Street was intended to be not only entertaining but educational as a children’s show. The show was created with the aim of helping lower-income 3-5 year-olds without access to preschool prepare for kindergarten, with the hope that the show’s bright colors and catchy songs would help viewers ultimately advance their speech and language (“Sesame Street” Debuts, 2009). The years leading up to a child’s beginning of school is a critical part of their language development. A child is developing in response to various stimuli (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association). This 5-year span results in varied experiences and therefore variations in the quality of language exposure, which in turn affects pronunciation, communication, and comprehension abilities (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association).

See also: Is my child on track linguistically? Take this quiz from the NIH!

The use of Child-Directed Speech is shown to aid in bonding with parents or caregivers, but also in language development in infants and toddlers (Green et al., 2010). CDS is a nonstandard form of natural speech when talking to infants or toddlers, is often slower, with more pauses and repetition, higher in pitch, more melodic and exaggerated, and may use simpler words than found in generic adult speech (Grin, 2016). Child Directed Speech also contributes to vocabulary development– recent studies have pinpointed key elements of CDS that are more likely to influence children’s word learning abilities: the use of the same words in adjacent sentences, the use of isolated words, and discourse continuity (Schachner & Hannon 2011).

Methods

In order to explore whether Sesame Street specifically exhibits positive language development traits through its Child-Directed Speech, we analyzed two selected episodes of Sesame Street: “Elmo’s Pretend School” (2006) and “Earth Day” (2019). These recent episodes have carried the traditional educational style of Sesame Street, therefore exemplifying ideologies and methodologies Sesame Street values in its teachings. We specifically analyzed conversations in lesson-based contexts and recorded the methods used to teach that lesson with a focus on 9 features of CDS: diminutives, 3rd person usage, simplified vocabulary, questions, exaggerated intonation, repetition, clear turn-taking, slowed pacing, and music. Most data was collected through simple manual transcription, however for certain features we recorded exchanges with formal conversation analysis techniques as well as the acoustic software Praat.

We aim to understand how Sesame Street uses Children-Directed Speech to keep children engaged and how the quality of it can possibly affect children’s speech as well. In order to measure the quality of CDS, we analyzed based on the methods used in “Specific Structural Features of Child-Directed Speech Support Young Children’s Word Learning,” by Jessica Feigenbaum Schwab. We focused on the prosody of CDS to examine how it engages the viewers while also looking out for repetition, slowed pacing, turn-taking and more to determine the quality of CDS. Sesame Street was created with the intention to help children develop communication skills, so we expect to find many high-quality instances of Child-Directed Speech– meaning a prominent use of CDS with high frequency of the foci listed above.

Results

After collecting our data, we were initially surprised to find that not all 9 aspects of CDS were present in our excerpts of Sesame Street. We’ll break down each one here:

Diminutives are words that are changed or affixed to make them appear small, cute, or reduce their meaning, or to put that in diminutives, appear “itsy-bitsy,” “cutesy,” and “meaningful-ish” (Merriam Webster, 2019). Despite being very common in parent-child speech, we observed that Sesame Street characters use no diminutives, likely because the writers would not want to introduce children to words outside of the Standard American English lexicon.

The use of the 3rd Person is marked when a speaker refers to themselves without personal pronouns like “I” and “me”. Sesame Street uses the 3rd person fairly often, especially with their star character Elmo who exclusively refers to himself in the 3rd person. You’ll never catch Elmo saying the pronoun “I,” though many other puppets might.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Speakers using Exaggerated Intonation will raise and lower the pitch of their voice greatly within a single sentence to emphasize keywords. In Figure 3, we have an example spectrogram of Grover asking the rhetorical question: “Did you know that in some places, children ride camels to school?” The blue line shows his wild variation in pitch!

Most CDS uses very Simplified Vocabulary, but in our observations, Sesame Street doesn’t shy away from using some pretty hefty words! We caught Grover using words that most adults would rarely use including “plethora,” “myriad,” and “kit and caboodle.”

Repetition is incredibly common in CDS and in Sesame Street. In the show, we observed puppets overwhelmingly repeating or over contextualizing new words to help viewers learn their meaning. The video below showcases the introduction of new vocabulary, stethoscope, via repetition.

With CDS, speakers will often try to engage the listener with Questions. Big Bird likes to ask the viewer questions to invite them to practice their speaking skills.

Conversations will often adopt Slowed Pacing between adults and children so that children can clearly hear the boundaries between different sounds, words, and phrases. When introducing new vocabulary, Elmo, for example, likes to sound words out: It’s not just a “pediatrician”; it’s a “pe-di-a-trician” (see the video clip below)! Some characters, however, talk quicker than even most adults.

In every conversation, the roles of speaker and listener will switch off in what we call Turn-Taking. Sesame Street characters will have extra long pauses between utterances to give other puppets or the viewer time to respond, just like CDS use would predict!

Finally, Music and rhythmic speech are other clear ways that CDS tries to get the attention of children and also acts as a way of creating more solid memories. In Sesame Street, it’s rare to get through an entire segment without a puppet bursting into a musical number about the lesson they just learned.

Out of all 9 of these CDS features, diminutives and simplified vocabulary are the only ones we never found continued evidence of. Furthermore, the use of the 3rd person and slowed pacing were only consistent features for a select population of muppet characters. Otherwise, the other 5 features are heavily employed throughout the show to help foster an engaging language-learning experience.

 

Discussion and Conclusions

Looking at an overview of the observations, we were able to find a general pattern that could explain why certain features were or weren’t used. Since the primary goal of Sesame Street is to prepare children for kindergarten, we found that the show often sacrifices certain CDS features that could possibly hinder a child’s development of standard language conventions used in school. Diminutives are out because if children use these very personal words in school, their teachers and peers may not understand what they’re referencing. Not using an overly simplified vocabulary also exposes children to situations where they don’t know what a particular word means, something that often happens in early schooling. The techniques Sesame Street does use tend to be more about supporting understanding of new concepts by making speech extra clear. The use of CDS is able to maintain a child’s engagement while also exemplifying nurturing language development activities, therefore we expect the show to have a positive impact on children’s language development in this context.

As for further use of our research, we plan to conduct similar analyses on similar television programs including Blue’s Clues, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Arthur, and Dragon Tales to establish a comparison matrix. By investigating the varying uses of Child-Directed Speech in each, we hope to find which television shows do a good job of fostering language development…and which ones fall flat.

See also: Ready to read? 11 shows to improve your child’s literacy. You’ll never guess what #7 is!

 

References

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (n.d.). Speech, Language, and Hearing Services for Children: A Smart Investment. Retrieved from https://www.asha.org/uploadedFiles/Speech-Language-Hearing-Services-for-Children.pdf

Debczak, M. (2019, February 13). The Peppa Effect: U.S. Kids Who Watch Peppa Pig Are Developing Slight British Accents. Retrieved from https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/574050/peppa-effect-kids-developing-british-accents-peppa-pig.

Diminutive. In The Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Retrieved December 9, 2019, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/diminutive

Ferguson, A., Pham, M., Gerard, T., & Aguilar, T. (2019). PROJECT PROPOSAL.

Green, J. R., Nip, I. S. B., Wilson, E. M., Mefferd, A., & Yunusova, Y. (2010). LIP MOVEMENT EXAGGERATIONS DURING INFANT DIRECTED SPEECH. Special Education and Communication Disorders Faculty Publications. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1053&context=specedfacpub

GRIN Verlag. (2016). Child-directed speech and its role in language acquisition. Munich.

McDonough P. TV viewing among kids at an eight-year high. Nielsenwire. October 26, 2009. Available at: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/media_entertainment/tv-viewing-among-kids-at-an-eight-year-high/. Accessed 11 November 2009.

Podesva, R. J. (2011). The California Vowel Shift And Gay Identity. American Speech, 86(1), 32–51. doi: 10.1215/00031283-1277501

Schachner, A., & Hannon, E. E. (2011). Infant-directed speech drives social preferences in 5-month-old infants. Developmental Psychology, 47(1), 19–25. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020740

Schwab, J. F. (2018). Specific structural features of child-directed speech support young children’s word learning (Order No. 10813697). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I; ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (2057297773). Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/2057297773?accountid=14512

“Sesame Street” Debuts. (2009, November 24). Retrieved from https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/sesame-street-debuts.

Speech and Language Services in Schools. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.asha.org/public/speech/development/Speech-and-Language-Services-in-Schools/.

ROWE, M. (2008). Child-directed speech: Relation to socioeconomic status, knowledge of child development and child vocabulary skill. Journal of Child Language, 35(1), 185-205. doi:10.1017/S0305000907008343
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-child-language/article/childdirected-speech-relation-to-socioeconomic-status-knowledge-of-child-development-and-child-vocabulary-skill/9A6AE54D0489EECB7F665B04DC61D365

The Innovative Internet

The world we exist in is dynamic. Constantly shifting and advancing, everything observed in our lives reflects the rapidity with which information is transmitted and trends rise to popularity. The internet is a large contributor to this speed, and allows for instant communication and advances that have enabled the growth of Western society. 

Since its inception, the internet has marked itself as a necessity — vast, collaborative, and informative — it is able to interweave itself into our daily lives. It has paved the way for innovative forms of communication, networking, and socialization; social media as an entity exists solely due to the impact and presence of the internet. 

One such social media platform that has gained enormous popularity is YouTube, a web-based service that allows users to both create and view videos online. If you have access to the internet, you have access to the billions of videos that are housed on YouTube. Viewers are able to utilize this in a plethora of capacities, whether that be for educational, motivational, or entertainment purposes (and these are only three basic categories in which people are able to interact with these videos). Content creators (people who record, edit, and post videos) are able to construct YouTube Channels, which act as a centralized location for all of their videos. They are able to design their own aesthetics and target specific audiences and populations through the videos they post. While there are many facets to creating popular content (performing certain acts, including other YouTubers in videos, interacting with viewers and outsiders, making specific types of videos such as lifestyle or beauty), it is through utilizing specific language and editing styles that these creators are able to attract their audiences and impact viewers’ lives. 

What do we know about vlogs?

To narrow down our investigation, we decided to focus on one video form: the vlog. While there are at least a dozen genres that exist on YouTube, we anticipated that nearly every college-aged student would have had exposure to vlogs in some way or another. 

First, we started off by finding a basic definition of vlogs, which we found in a study by Heather Molyneaux, Susan O’Donell and Kerri Gibson (2009):

“‘Vlogs,’ also known as video blogs, are video web logs[… ]Vlogs are a form of online publishing, allowing everyone with web access[…] to create and post content. Most vlogs are authored by individuals and focus on personal themes.”

This further proves our idea that multitudes of youth have connections to these types of videos, as they are created with the intention of fostering personal connections and sharing intimate details of a vlogger’s life. 

Yet settling on this genre of video is not narrow enough in its scope to truly observe any sociolinguistic phenomena. To rectify this, we decided to specify a target population — to identify not only a type of vlog, but also a similar group of vloggers. 

It is evident that YouTube is a social media platform where hundreds of millions of videos are posted telling or portraying the image of women (Molyneaux et al. 2009). Vlogging videos are not only showcasing women, but also influencing the women watching these videos. When focusing on the context of storytelling, there are certain methods vloggers use to keep their audience interested. In scientific terms, vloggers use a participation framework and language that reflects audience design through things like terms of address, questions, and directed language (Frobenius 2014). This basically means that vloggers produce their speech to create an environment where the viewers aren’t actually speaking but are still a part of the conversation. In a sense, there is an audience involvement resembling a face-to-face conversation, and more specifically, a storytelling conversation. When a vlogger tells a story, there is a lack of turn taking since the viewer isn’t actually able to reply, which is what frames the way vloggers speak (Frobenius 2014). If a viewer frequents a certain vlogger’s video, then a community-based knowledge system is formed, which results in a mutual understanding on many topics. In this situation, the fanbase becomes acclimated to the vlogger’s language variants, and may adapt these variants into their own speech. This is how we came to the conclusion that the linguistic variants displayed by these content creators must influence the conversation styles of young adults. Our study will help reveal the impact vloggers (strangers who feel like virtual friends) have on their audience. We were most interested in observing the speech trends in the young women of today. To do this, we needed to evaluate the effects the internet has on not only stylistic and linguistic changes among a specific population, including its reach, speed, and popularity, but also on the use of these variants in people’s lives outside of the internet.

How did we do it?

We took inspiration from an interesting prior study – a content analysis of vloggers, and audience response to these vloggers (Molyneaux et al. 2009). In this study, the subjects, who were all in their teens to 20s, were given a demographic background check and shown a few vlogs. A survey was then conducted to investigate insight into the influence of gender. We employed their survey method to collect and analyze data on the variable of speech variants. Our survey was distributed it to our peers online (through email, Facebook, and other social media), polling students on their personal demographic information as well as their entertainment preferences online. We also provided key phrases that exemplified the linguistic variants we investigated and asked that they self-report how they first came across the phrases, and how frequently they estimate their use weekly. In order to make our survey interesting, the second portion included fun stills and clips of the variants we were investigating in order to ensure the self-reported data was an accurate reflection of the variants (this way participants would be aware of which motions and phrases we were explicitly asking about, and could then compare to their own behaviors). We expected that the responses to the second part of our survey would garner more explicit and clear results exemplifying the variants in question. Here are some of the variants that we observed in vloggers, and used in our survey:

1. 1. Okay so…

1. 2. You know?

1. 3. Hand gestures

1. 4. The ‘welp’ expression

1. 5. Repeating words

1. 6. Pause and awkward smile 

What did we find?

Utilizing the data from our survey, we were able to generate the following figures that summarize results to key questions. As seen in Figure 1, all participants indicated they tell stories at least once a week, with over 60% reporting casual story-telling on a daily basis. This information is useful as it ensures the data we collected is actually applicable to our study. 

Additionally, Figure 2 also helps validate our results as it shows that all participants watch YouTube videos at least once a week. These statistics are crucial for our analysis as they confirm that students who responded to our survey are representative of our target population.

Some of the most used variants, as indicated by survey participants, include hand gestures, saying “you know” and “okay so,” using the ‘welp’ expression, and smiling awkwardly for effect. The total percent usage of each variant is summarized in Figure 3. 

In an effort to acquire more reliable data (as self-reported information can easily be inaccurate or falsified), we also analyzed recordings of people telling stories offline as well. We counted all instances in which the variants in question appeared in these exchanges and generated a frequency chart, as seen in Figure 4. This analysis revealed that the most commonly utilized variants offline include hand gestures, making faces, repetition, and smiling awkwardly for effect. 

A comparison of the trends observed from survey responses and the video recordings shows that overall, the most popular and widely-used variants are saying key phrases such as “okay so” and “you know,” giving an awkward smile, and using hand gestures and facial expressions. 

The big picture

The apparent growth of YouTube’s content creators and their following base led to our hypothesis that linguistic variants are used by YouTubers to draw and influence their audience. Our results support our hypothesis that linguistic features associated with popular YouTubers are utilized by our sample in their own personal conversations. First, the sample data indicates that almost the entirety of respondents (94.5%) engage in storytelling at least multiple times a week. Building on this, the entire sample watches YouTube at least once a week. The combination of these results imply that our sample was a strong representation of YouTube viewers, such that the respondents are evidently influenced to some degree by YouTube content. This combination of results also aligns with Zappavigna’s assertions (2012) regarding the substantial influence of internet content in our lives, since our sample’s frequency of watching YouTube is roughly the same as the frequency of their story-telling. In other words, our respondents spend almost as much time being influenced by YouTube content as they do influencing others with their own personal content.

Our results continue to illustrate the interaction between YouTube viewing and personal story-telling, and show that respondents often use linguistic variants associated with vloggers. The usage of each linguistic variant across our sample is at least 25%, with usage rates above 50% for seven out of the 12 variants. When compared to the frequency in which variants were used in the casual conversation recordings, each variant was used at least once, with three variants appearing at least 10 times. In sum, people do not just use vlogger linguistic variants in their own personal conversations, they use them frequently.

Some limitations to the conclusions of our study are based on potential ambiguity of our survey questions and influences from our respondents’ social backgrounds. The first question about story-telling frequency may be confusing to respondents, causing some to indicate more or less than they actually tell stories. This may explain the group of respondents that only tell stories once a week, or the group that tells stories multiple times a day. Additionally, some respondents may identify with social groups that frequently use linguistic variants that happen to overlap with the variants used by vloggers. For instance, our sample consisted of UCLA students, and UCLA language culture may have similar variant usage to vloggers. In this case, respondents are influenced by at least two separate entities, but the amount of influence from each entity varies. That is not to say that those respondents are not influenced by vloggers, but that the influence is possibly less than the results suggest. Overall, the limitations of our study may show that the influence and draw of vloggers’ linguistic variants are less than the results suggest, though still present.

Future research on this topic could focus on the influence of vlogger language variants on those who identify as men. A study focused on the differences in vlogger influence based on gender may reveal some factors that gender identity have on certain linguistic variant uses. Another topic that could be explored further is the growing influence of vloggers relative to traditional celebrities (e.g., actors, musicians, models). Influence on viewers may be stronger with vloggers due to relatability, but the extent of this effect should be investigated. Finally, the ability to which a popular vlogger can use their influence to market products may reveal that vloggers have more responsibility than they think.

 

Bibliography

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Introduction

We have all been interrupted by others while saying something. Being interrupted is a universal experience, but have you ever thought of what factors affect how we interrupt? In the following, our team will present to you in what ways dynamics in negotiations can be reflected through the use of interruptions under familial and political contexts. 

By comparing U.S. politicians to American families of Asian descent, we will first examine which type of interruptions (power, rapport, or neutral) people prefer using in these two situations respectively. We assume family members may mainly use interruptions to build rapport, while politicians interrupt for the purpose of exerting power. 

After taking a closer look at the composition of each interruption, we are going to analyze the cultural background of why some interruptions emerge in the conversations to search for potential generalizations about the connection between contexts and the use of interruptions. We hope that by considering the influence of individualistic/collectivistic culture (American vs countries like Korea and the Philippines), we can understand why certain interruptions occur. 

Background information

Conversation is usually organized in a way, such that only one person speaks at a time. Speakers take turns talking, and use a wide range of linguistic cues indicating the end of their turn (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson 1974 p.670). However, norms of turn-taking can be violated when a speaker “starts up in the midst of another’s turn at talk[ing]” as well as “disturbs his/her finishing” (Jefferson 1984 p.16). 

Interruption in turn-taking has been regarded as a sign of possessing power over others in past literature. Natale et al.’s discovery in 1979 shows the more confident a person is about his/her position with regard to the conversation partner(s), the higher the rate of successful interruptions he/she imposes (p.874). Besides displaying social power, interruptions can serve other functions. According to Goldberg’s study (1990), interruptions are not only acts of conflict but also acts of collaboration. On some occasions, the speaker interrupts so as to demonstrate that he/she understands the conversation and relates to his/her listeners. Yet, there are interruptions that neither aim at building rapport nor displaying power — neutral instances where “repair[s], repeat[s], or clarification[s] of the prior, interrupted utterance” take place (p.888). Building on Goldberg’s findings (i.e., how to identify three main types of interruption), our team finds the relationship between interruptions and contexts is worth further discussion.

Another question we would like to answer is why certain groups use certain interruptions. Our potential explanation will be based on the collectivism-individualism theoretical framework. The framework classifies cultures into two categories: individualist (e.g., the U.S.) and collectivist (e.g., China, Korea, and the Philippines). The former prioritizes individual attainment above team goals, creating a sense of competition among people. In collectivist cultures, on the other hand, people place more focus on achieving group goals than satisfying personal desires (Triandis and Gelfand 2012 p.513). 

Indeed, some research provides empirical evidence to support the idea that culture plays a significant role in determining the occurrence of interruptions. For instance, Li mentioned in his study that Americans use more intrusive interruptions in conversations than Japanese (2001 p.261-262). We therefore aim to extend people’s understanding of the relationship between contexts and interruptions by applying the cultural theory of individualism and collectivism. 

Methods

Investigating interruptions within a familial situation, two of our group members voice-recorded a couple of (around 5-10) negotiations in casual dialogue between the parent and children in those families. In both the Filipino and Korean households, our group members left their recording devices in the rooms where each family negotiated about their certain topics. The members then uploaded the recordings they collected to Youtube and pinpointed the exact times that interruptions occurred in the conversations. They transcribed all the labeled interruptions (as well as a few utterances and spoken sentences before/after the interruption) for future analysis. 

In order to explore interruptions within a political environment, we analyze the 2016 presidential debates. This debate featured Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The debates’ transcripts that we based on and added more details into can be found here.

With the data we gathered, we identified all interruptions occurring in the negotiation. Then, we categorized them into three types of interruptions: power, rapport, or neutral interruptions. To see whether or not our hypotheses could be justified, we not only counted the frequency of each type of interruption but also a conversational analysis that examines the influence of culture and context on the use of interruptions in a negotiation.

Results

 

Figure 1 reflects the percentage of each interruption type (i.e., power, neutral, and rapport) occurring in political and familial contexts. We discovered 50 interruptions within the families and throughout the debates from the political aspect respectively. Among the politicians, 68% of interruptions is used to exert power while 32% of them belongs to neutral interruption; in the extreme, no rapport interruption could be found. Unexpectedly, the most frequently-appeared type of interruption in familial context is power (25 out of 50). Rapport interruption only accounts for 14% of the total interruptions in familiar negotiation, and the percentage of neutral interruption exceeds it by 22%.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The most significant difference between political and familial negotiation is the frequency of rapport interruptions. As you can see in Table 1, the data that we have collected from the political dialogue only had power and neutral interruptions. It means rapport interruption did not occur in the political negotiation. On the other hand, we can find all three types of interruptions in the familial negotiation. We initially assumed that family members mainly use interruptions to build rapport; meanwhile, politicians interrupt for the purpose of exerting power. Yet, now it seems like what we assumed is not the case in reality.

Discussion and Conclusions

As mentioned earlier, we discovered that family members and politicians interrupt for the purpose of exerting power most times. But unlike politicians, family members occasionally use interruptions to build rapport. So why is there such a difference? Let’s try to answer this question by first looking at this excerpt adapted from one of the audio recordings that depicts a negotiation among family members:

1  S:   I don’t drink mom (0.8) or smoke (0.3) so you’re good.

2  S:   I don’t do neither of those

3  S:   I know better than that

4  M:   We don’t:::

5  D:       [Can I chaperone mom?=

6  M:   =Eh that’s if you go with him

7  D:                         [Yes, I will go with him

8  S:   (1.0) To drop me off (chuckles)

9  D:   I, I

10 M:      [we::ll

11 D:           [I:: will spy on him 

12 M:                  [then you’re gonna leave him

13 D:   No I won’t leave him

In this negotiation, the 17 year-old boy (S) is trying to convince his “strict” mom (M) to let him go to a birthday party. The mother is hesitant and skeptical of letting her son go due to the family’s upbringing and cultural background. When the mother is giving a lecture to the son, the daughter (D) interrupts the mother and offered if she could chaperone her brother to the party. Her suggestion created a middle ground between the worried mother and the son who wants to go to the party. What the daughter did is an example of rapport interruption in familial context.

But in political context, none of the interrupters empathizes with the interruptee and/or the speech content. Before explaining why this is the case, take a look at the following excerpt (a modified version of the original transcript):

1  W:   Hold on [hold on wait Hold on, folks.

2  T:           [nono that

3  W:   Because we… this is going to end up getting out of control
        Let’s (0.2) try to keep it quiet so 

4  W:   (0.5) for the candidates and for the American people=

5  T:   =So just to finish on the borde[rs

6  W:                                  [Yes

7  T:   She wants open borders (0.2) People are going to pour into 
        our country 

8  T:   People are going to come in from Syria. She wants 550 
        percent more people than Barack 

9  T:   <Obama, and he has> thousands and thousands of people
        They have no idea where they come from...

This excerpt shows an example of neutral interruption in political context. The moderator Wallace (W) acted as a participant who held a neutral stance, and tried not to let candidates like Trump (T) move away from the topic throughout the negotiations. We all noticed that the role that Wallace played in the negotiation is moderator, a role that requires him to adopt a neutral stance.

Not only was the stance that he can adopt restricted but also his use of interruption types was limited to neutral and power. On the contrary, the daughter in the familial context was inclined to maintain harmonious relationship among the two participant who were in a direct confrontation. Being a mediator, she could pick side and choose to help the son to persuade the mother for letting him to go to the party. Factors like this play a significant role in creating situations where certain type of interruption happens (more frequently) in one context but not the other.

Moreover, the fact of being raised in a collectivistic culture does not affect a person using more rapport or neutral interruptions than power interruptions. Rather than cultural reasons, other factors (such as carrying out self-perceived role in a negotiation) contributed much more to the occurrence of our findings. Therefore, in the future, if we are given a chance to continue our study, we will identify more factors behind the way of how political and familial contexts affect speakers’ preference in which type of interruptions they use. And hopefully, we will seek another theoretical framework to explain all the differences we discover.

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