William Strunk and the Human Brain

Patrick Schultz — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 03:41:55 +0000

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Patrick Schultz

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Via the Website of Joseph Harris's Writing 20

If there is one piece of advice that all usage guide writers seem to agree on, it is that good writing is clear and concise. A good writer makes the reader’s life easy. Rules from “Use the active voice” to “Avoid preposition stranding” are put in place because they supposedly achieve simplicity and ease comprehension. In "The Elements of Style, for instance, William Strunk describes the active voice as “more direct” than the passive and writes that it “produces brevity”. This intuitively makes sense--the reversal of agent and patient seems confusing--but is a passive construction really harder to process for the reader? Studies in language cognition have investigated this and similar issues in some detail.

Frazier et al.’s (1984) reading study, for instance, finds that readers are able to process passivized sentences faster than active sentences. Ferreira (2003) suggest that this somewhat puzzling finding only applies to a certain type of passive sentence - the ones that Strunk approves of as well: “This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary. […] The need of making a particular word the subject of the sentence will often […] determine which voice is to be used” (18). In their study, Frazier et al. also find that sentence reading time depended significantly on the context the sentence appears in: combinations of active and passive voice (Mary kicked the ball and the Frisbee was thrown by John) really puzzle readers and slow down sentence processing. The effects of this kind of parallelism, they argue, can be found with other grammatical constructions as well. Strunk makes a similar point when he demands that “expressions similar in content and function be outwardly similar” (26).

Carrithers and Bever’s (1984) theory of reading comprehension also suggests that clauses in the passive voice should be processed faster than their active counterparts. Their eye-tracking study does not, however, produce any data to back this up. But they do present some other variables that influence text comprehension: They find, for example, that word length is the most important predictor of processing time. Short words are parsed much faster than long ones (time/letter). The easiest way to make a text accessible is therefore to choose short words over longer synonyms (usually Germanic over Romance words).

Carrithers and Bever also find that readers slow down significantly towards the end of a sentence. This, according to Carrither, suggests that the reader's brain is busy parsing the beginning of the sentence; the reader therefore pays less attention to words at the end of a sentence (e.g. is less likely to notice that they are misspelled). Strunk’s rule to “place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end” (32) might therefore not always be the best advice to give.

This somewhat random assortment of findings illustrates that the advice given in usage guides like “The Elements of Style” is to some extent supported by empirical research; it also shows, however, that these are rules of thumb that cannot do justice to the complexity of the reading task.

Works Cited:

Carrithers, Caroline and Thomas G. Bever. 1984. "Eye-fixation Patterns during reading confirm theories of language comprehension". Cognitive Science 8.

Ferreira, Fernanda. 2003. "The misinterpretation of noncanonical sentences". Cognitive Psychology 47.

Frazier, Lyn at al. 1984. "Parallel structure: A source of facilitation in sentence comprehension". Memory and Cognition 12.5.

Teaching English as a Non-Native Speaker

Patrick Schultz — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 03:01:12 +0000

Author:

Patrick Schultz

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Jeffrey Coolidge

Teaching English classes (or any kind of class, for that matter) to an audience of native speakers can be intimidating for graduate instructors who are not native speakers of English. Even if communication as such is not a problem, students will react differently to a non-native speaker when it comes to grading their papers or teaching them about grammar or style. Research shows that undergraduate students tend to associate accented, “broken” English with a lack of qualifications (Rubin & Smith 1991). An easy remedy seems obvious: Give foreign instructors better language training, and everything will be fine. It turns out, however, that students’ perception of the teacher’s language skills is only partly determined by the instructor’s command of grammar, lexicon, and pronunciation: Recent studies in speech perception find that students’ social attitudes strongly influence their impression of how well their teacher speaks English.

The first and probably most surprising finding is that the teacher’s looks, more specifically the teacher’s perceived ethnicity, influences students’ speech perception. Several studies have described what we might call “dialect hallucination”: Listeners will hear an accent where there is none. In Rubin 1992, for instance, two groups of students were asked to listen to a recorded lecture and were shown a photograph of the speaker. While the recordings were identical, the photos were not: Researchers presented a photo of a Caucasian speaker to one group, a picture of an Asian woman to the other. Even though all participants were exposed to the same recording of unaccented American English, the students who were under the impression that they were listening to an Asian speaker reported significantly more difficulties in understanding the speaker. The participants heard an accent where there was none, judging from her “foreign” appearance that her speech probably sounded foreign, too. This imagined accent directly influenced their behavior during the lecture: students associated accented speech with lower qualifications and paid less attention to what the speaker had to say.

Now besides the fact that listeners might just imagine an accent based on the looks of their teacher, they will also not treat all accents the same. Students’ evaluation of how “correct” or “pleasant” their non-native teacher speaks varies according to the first language of the teacher: In a study (Lindemann 2005) that asked students to label foreign-accented English according to “correctness” and “pleasantness”, participants generally perceived Western European accents to be more “correct” than varieties from China, India, Russia or Mexico. While some of these findings make sense linguistically since speakers of closely related European languages might find it easier to learn English, the ratings seem influenced by the students’ attitudes towards the specific country. A Mexican accent, for instance, will be quite similar to the Spanish accent of a teacher from Spain; the former, however, is consistently described as less correct and less pleasant than the latter. The table reproduced below presents several similar examples. French-accented English, for instance, will be perceived as “more correct” than Chinese- or Russian-accented English, even if all the speakers have almost native-like competence.

From: Lindemann (2005): 192

Students’ perception of their teacher’s competence in English is thus more than a simple reaction to language skills. Social attitudes and stereotypes influence students’ evaluation of their teacher’s linguistic competence and qualifications.

Works Cited:

Lindemann, Stephanie. 2005. "Who speaks 'broken English'? US undergraduates' perceptions of non-native English". International Journal of Applied Linguistics (15.2): 187-212.

Rubin, Donald L. 1992. "Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates' judgment of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants". Research in Higher Education (33.4): 511-531.

Rubin, Donald and Kim Smith. 1990. "Effects of accent, ethnicity and lecture topic on undergraduates' perception of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. International Journal of Intercultural Relations (14.3): 337-353.

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William Strunk and the Human Brain

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Teaching English as a Non-Native Speaker

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