Past frame-switching research focused on tasks for which assimilating to cues is adaptive. However, frame-switching occurs even when cues are presented and judgments and decisions are measured implicitly, consistent with automaticity ( 4 – 6). Biculturals respond to audience cues less under higher cognitive load, consistent with effortful control ( 3). Past research provides some support for each account. An automatic mechanism is cultural priming: cues associated with a culture set off spreading activation within one’s network of knowledge related to the culture, elevating its accessibility. A controlled mechanism is impression management, tailoring one’s judgments to the expected cultural audience. In experiments that vary whether Chinese-American biculturals are exposed to Chinese or American cultural cues (e.g., icon images such as a Dragon versus Mickey Mouse, or a Chinese versus American audience), they exhibit either Chinese or American cultural tendencies in their subsequent judgments and decisions ( 1, 2).įrame-switching could reflect controlled or automatic processes. A visiting Taiwanese art professor lectures fluently about a slide of Grecian urns but then falters on a slide of Ming vases, struggling to recall the word “translucent.” What is it about the sight of a Chinese face or a Chinese vase that can trigger dysfluency in speaking English as a second language?Ĭultural psychologists increasingly study the dynamics through which people’s cultural habits are situationally evoked, such as “frame switching,” the shifts in judgment that bicultural individuals exhibit as they move between settings governed by different cultural norms, such as home versus the workplace. We discuss conceptual implications for the automaticity and adaptiveness of cultural priming and practical implications for immigrant acculturation and second-language learning.Ī newly arrived graduate student from China manages to speak English smoothly to one classmate, Joe Smith, but stumbles when talking to another, Mike Liu. Finally, in both recognition (study 3) and naming tasks (study 4), Chinese icon priming increased accessibility of anomalous literal translations, indicating the intrusion of Chinese lexical structures into English processing. ![]() ![]() American) culture hindered Chinese immigrants’ English fluency, when speaking about both culture-laden and culture-neutral topics (study 2). Similarly, exposure to iconic symbols of Chinese (vs. Caucasian) face reduced their English fluency, but at the same time increased their social comfort, effects that did not occur for a comparison group of European Americans (study 1). For Chinese immigrants in the United States, speaking to a Chinese (vs. The present studies investigate the proposal that heritage-culture cues hinder immigrants’ second-language processing by priming first-language structures. Research suggests that cultural cues may affect judgments through automatic priming, but has yet to investigate consequences for linguistic performance. ![]() For bicultural individuals, visual cues of a setting’s cultural expectations can activate associated representations, switching the frames that guide their judgments.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |