'Am I anorexic?': weight, eating and discourses of the body in online adolescent health communication

This article explores the communicative choices of adolescents seeking advice from an internet-based health forum run by medical professionals. Techniques from the disciplines of sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics are integrated to examine the strategies used in adolescents’ health questions. We focus on the emergent theme of Weight and Eating, a concern which features prominently in adolescents’ requests to medical practitioners. The majority of advice requests are authored by adolescent girls, with queries peaking at age 12. A combined quantitative and qualitative analysis provides detailed insights into adolescents’ communicative strategies. Examinations of question types, register and a discourse-based analysis draw attention to dominant discourses of the body, including a ‘discourse of slenderness’ and a ‘discourse of normality’, which exercise negative influences on adolescents’ dietary behaviours. The findings are of applied linguistic relevance to health practitioners and educators as they provide them with access to adolescents’ health queries in their own language

Towards a corpus-based description of speech-gesture units of meaning: The case of the circular gesture

The theories and methods in corpus linguistics (CL) have had an impact on numerous areas in applied linguistics. However, the interface between CL and multimodal speech-gesture studies remains underexplored. One fundamental question is whether it is possible, and even appropriate, to apply the theories and paradigms established based on textual data to multimodal data. To explore this, we examine how CL can assist investigating lexico-grammatical patterns of speech co-occurring with a recurrent gesture (i.e. the circular gesture). Sinclair’s (1996) unit of meaning model is used to describe the co-gestural speech patterns. The study draws on a subset of the Nottingham Multimodal Corpus, in which 570 instances of circular gestures and their co-occurring speech are identified and analysed. We argue that Sinclair’s unit of meaning model can be extended to include speech-gesture patterns, and that those descriptions enable a more nuanced understanding of meaning in context

Beyond monomodal spoken corpora

The case study described in this chapter involves the incorporation of 'non-linguistic' data streams in spoken corpus analysis. Here new possibilities are outlined for how we may relate to use of language measurements of different aspects of context gathered from multiple sensors (especially, for example, of position, movement and time. Such alternative data streams are seen to be a means of generating valuable insights into discourse, by exploring the extent to which everyday language and communicative choices can be determined by different spatial, temporal social and experiential contexts and can embrace a variety of different non-linguistic sources of data

Role models in language learning: Results of a large-scale international survey

Role models can exert considerable influence in shaping individuals’ values, attitudes and beliefs. A large body of work in the social sciences has investigated the influence of celebrity role models, and in the context of education several disciplines have a rich research history in this area (e.g. medical education). However, in the context of second language acquisition, research centred on role models has largely remained on the periphery. This study presents a large-scale international survey investigating the role models of English language learners. With data collected from 8,472 participants, analysis investigated whether these learners had English language role models, who the role models were and what characteristics learners valued in them, and investigated systematic variation among subgroups. Results showed that 68% of respondents reported having an English language role model, and four key role model dimensions emerged: overall command of English, paralinguistic features, personal attributes and accent/variety of English. We argue that role modelling may be a highly influential component of the psychological context of SLA, and conclude by highlighting several valuable areas for future research

A multimodal approach to assessing user experiences with agent helpers

The study of agent helpers using linguistic strategies such as vague language and politeness has often come across obstacles. One of these is the quality of the agent's voice and its lack of appropriate fit for using these strategies. The first approach of this article compares human vs. synthesised voices in agents using vague language. This approach analyses the 60,000-word text corpus of participant interviews to investigate the differences of user attitudes towards the agents, their voices and their use of vague language. It discovers that while the acceptance of vague language is still met with resistance in agent instructors, using a human voice yields more positive results than the synthesised alternatives. The second approach in this article discusses the development of a novel multimodal corpus of video and text data to create multiple analyses of human-agent interaction in agent-instructed assembly tasks. The second approach analyses user spontaneous facial actions and gestures during their interaction in the tasks. It found that agents are able to elicit these facial actions and gestures and posits that further analysis of this nonverbal feedback may help to create a more adaptive agent. Finally, the approaches used in this article suggest these can contribute to furthering the understanding of what it means to interact with software agents

Research ethics and public trust, preconditions for continued growth of internet mediated research: public confidence in internet mediate research

In this paper we argue for the position that responsible safeguards for privacy and ethical treatment of human data are of vital importance to retain the public confidence and trust that is necessary for the development and future success of internet mediated research (IMR). We support our position based on the high level of popular and media attention that is currently directed at IMR, which in combination with the relative uncertainties that still exist around the ethics of various IMR methods, raises the risk that IMR might succumb to a public backlash of similar proportions to the controversy that hit genetically modified (GM) crops in Europe. Based on the lessons that came out of the GM crops controversy we discuss the ethics requirements and challenges that must be met in order to retain the public trust in IMR. We end our argument by briefly reviewing a couple of examples of “privacy protecting architectures” that are being developed for IMR

The language of vaccination campaigns during COVID-19

Understanding what makes communication effective when designing public health messages is of key importance. This applies in particular to vaccination campaigns, which aim to encourage vaccine uptake and respond to vaccine hesitancy and dispel any myth or misinformation. This paper explores the ways in which the governments of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) promoted COVID-19 vaccination as a first-line strategy and studies health message effectiveness by examining the language of official vaccination campaigns, vaccine uptake across the different nations and the health message preferences of unvaccinated and vaccine sceptic individuals. The study considers communications beginning at the first lockdown until the point when daily COVID-19 updates ended for each nation. A corpus linguistic analysis of official government COVID-19 updates is combined with a qualitative examination of the expression of evaluation in governmental discourses, feedback from a Public Involvement Panel and insights from a nationally representative survey of adults in Great Britain to explore message production and reception. Fully vaccinated, unvaccinated and sceptic respondents showed similar health messaging preferences and perceptions of health communication efficacy, but unvaccinated and sceptic participants reported lower levels of compliance for all health messages considered. These results suggest that issues in health communication are not limited to vaccination hesitancy, and that in the future, successful vaccination campaigns need to address the determining factors of public attitudes and beliefs besides communication strategies

The language of vaccination campaigns during COVID-19

Understanding what makes communication effective when designing public health messages is of key importance. This applies in particular to vaccination campaigns, which aim to encourage vaccine uptake and respond to vaccine hesitancy and dispel any myth or misinformation. This paper explores the ways in which the Governments of Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales) promoted COVID-19 vaccination as a first-line strategy and studies health message effectiveness by examining the language of official vaccination campaigns, vaccine uptake across the different nations, and the health message preferences of unvaccinated and vaccine sceptic individuals. The study considers communications beginning at the first lockdown until the point when daily Coronavirus updates ended for each nation. A corpus linguistic analysis of official Government Coronavirus updates is combined with a qualitative examination of the expression of evaluation in governmental discourses, feedback from a Public Involvement Panel, and insights from a nationally representative survey of adults in Great Britain to explore message production and reception. Fully vaccinated, unvaccinated, and sceptic respondents showed similar health messaging preferences and perceptions of health communication efficacy, but unvaccinated and sceptic participants reported lower levels of compliance for all health messages considered. These results suggest that issues in health communication are not limited to vaccination hesitancy, and that in the future, successful vaccination campaigns need to address the determining factors of public attitudes and beliefs besides communication strategies

Ethics of personalized information filtering

Online search engines, social media, news sites and retailers are all investing heavily in the development of ever more refined information filtering to optimally tune their services to the specific demands of their individual users and customers. In this position paper we examine the privacy consequences of user profile models that are used to achieve this information personalization, the lack of transparency concerning the filtering choices and the ways in which personalized services impact the user experience. Based on these considerations we argue that the Internet research community has a responsibility to increase its efforts to investigate the means and consequences of personalized information filtering

PriPA: a tool for privacy-preserving analytics of linguistic data

The days of large amorphous corpora collected with armies of Web crawlers and stored indefinitely are, or should be, coming to an end. There is a wealth of hidden linguistic information which is increasingly difficult to access, hidden in personal and private data that would be unethical and technically challenging to collect using traditional methods such as Web crawling and mass surveillance of online discussion spaces. Advances in privacy regulations such as GDPR and changes in the zeitgeist bring into question the problematic ethical dimension of extracting information from unaware if not unwilling participants. Modern corpora need to adapt, be focused on testing specific hypotheses, and be respectful of the privacy of the people who generated its data. Our work focuses on using a distributed participatory approach and continuous informed consent to solve these issues, by allowing participants to voluntarily contribute their own censored personal data at a granular level. We evaluate our approach in a three-pronged manner, testing the accuracy of measurement of statistical measures of language with respect to standard corpus linguistics tools, evaluating the usability of our application with a participant involvement panel, and using the tool for a case study on health communication