Cultural Differences in Stress and Intonation: Language Processing

Introduction

Language is arguably the most essential and recognizable cultural identifier. The communicative value of language far exceeds that of the simple meanings behind words; information is transmitted through syntax, word stress, and intonation by methods that are highly mediated by the culture of both the speaker and the listener. Recent and ongoing research has shown that differences in intonation and stress patterns from language to language and culture to culture correlate with subtle differences in the brain's development and processing of language, beginning even in pre-linguistic infants. This suggests that culture and language, far from being limited to external and conscious factors of differentiation and recognition, also enter into an early internal dialogue that shapes the very brains of individuals within a given culture.

The fact that native speakers of different languages — and even, to a degree, speakers of the same language from different cultures — recognize and utilize different stress and intonation patterns is well documented. So, too, is the stress pattern and intonation recognition of pre-lingual infants, suggesting that language processing is an early step — perhaps one of the earliest — in the formation of cultural identity within an individual. The exact relationship between the cognitive skills and abilities that allow infants to process and show a preference for one language over another, and overall cognitive development, has also received some scholarly attention. As yet, however, no study has aimed specifically at connecting the early elements of language acquisition to overall cognitive and cultural development. This paper attempts a preliminary understanding of that issue.

Language is one of the key mechanisms for the transmission of cultural models — for understanding others' ways of thinking, perceiving, and relating to others and the surrounding environment (Bonvillain, 2007). These cultural models include macro components such as mythologies and religious beliefs, as well as far more subtle micro components that not only allow for the transmission of cultural models via language, but actually influence the shaping and recognition of language in a culturally unique way (Bonvillain, 2007). That is, every culture has a worldview that differs in subtle yet very real ways, and this is both reflected in and reinforced by that culture's use of language. Both allowances for certain word variations and "missing" concepts or terms from a culture's language provide readily apparent examples of these cultural differences, but there are more common and pervasive differences that are arguably more telling.

Background

Word stress and intonation patterns are unique to every language, and even to every culture's or subculture's use of a given language. The English spoken by a native Texan, for instance, is markedly different from that of a Minnesotan, despite using almost entirely the same vocabulary and grammatical structure. Continuing research is beginning to suggest that notable differences in the cognitive processing of native and foreign stress patterns are observable within the first six months of life, long before infants exhibit any linguistic ability (Friederici et al., 2007). In addition, there is some evidence suggesting that overall cognitive function and perception may be affected by differences in the cognitive processes of language acquisition and verbal pattern recognition in pre-linguistic infants, which are known to exist along cultural lines (Friederici et al., 2007; Hohle et al., 2009).

Strangely, despite the increasing attention paid to language in both biological and sociological fields, the differences in sounds produced by different languages and cultures have received very little study (Bonvillain, 2007). These differences in sounds are highly important within specific cultures as well; there are many known instances of gender differentiation and class distinction based on pronunciation and the availability of various phonetic sounds and units to a given subset of a culture (Bonvillain, 2007). Both intra- and intercultural sound differences have been shown to have a neurological and cognitive basis, with effects observable neurologically in infancy that are socially and culturally expressed via language usage and acquisition ability well into adulthood (Nguyen et al., 2008).

The link between the cognitive and cultural aspects of intercultural linguistic differences — specifically stress and intonation differences — has received little scholarly attention as yet (Arciuli & Slowiaczek, 2007). Though each of these aspects of language has received a fair amount of independent attention, a cohesive study of the various linguistic phenomena that serve as cultural markers and transmitters has yet to be undertaken. Stress pattern and intonation differences have been noted in relation to perceptions of other cultures and in their effects upon language acquisition skills later in life, with strong implications for the cognitive differences created by early language development. The link between these findings, however, remains a missing yet vital part of understanding language's full implications (Laroche et al., 2009; Zhang et al., 2008).

Studies concerning specific intercultural linguistic differences and intracultural idiosyncrasies are widely varied, and it can be difficult to draw broad conclusions from a synthesis of so much disparate information. There are, however, enough common strands across many of these studies to begin drawing a tenuous link between the cultural and cognitive aspects of language acquisition and differentiation. In a study of word and syllable stress in the final words of spoken syntactical units in American English, Turk and Shattuck-Hufnagel (2007) found that final word stress is closely related to the main-stress syllable. Their most significant finding was the inconsistent differentiation of medial stresses in words falling between the main-stress syllable and the final word or syllable. This suggested that the automatic cognitive processes influencing word stress and pattern recognition are more complex than current models account for, necessitating a reevaluation of language development theory (Turk & Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2007).

A cross-cultural study conducted by Zhang et al. (2008) found similar issues at work in native Mandarin speakers and their ability to both recognize and reproduce stress patterns in spoken English. The researchers noted that the basic elements used to distinguish stressed and unstressed syllables were the same for both native Mandarin and native English speakers, but that the levels of emphasis and attention placed individually on these elements differed between the two cultures (Zhang et al., 2008). Furthermore, the Mandarin speakers exhibited considerable difficulty in reproducing certain stress patterns. The study suggested that these difficulties arose largely from differences in the general stress patterns of Mandarin and English, as well as from the different set of available vowel sounds (Zhang et al., 2008). Recognition of stress patterns as an early part of cognitive development could result in the learning difficulties observed.

Literature Review

Nguyen et al. (2008) came to significantly different conclusions in their study of both beginner and advanced Vietnamese speakers of English when compared to native Australian speakers. The most salient difference between the findings of Nguyen et al. (2008) and Zhang et al. (2008) was the utilization of certain acoustical aspects in recognizing and repeating stress patterns in spoken Australian English. While Vietnamese speakers utilized three of the same four criteria noted in Zhang et al. (2008), timing contrast was virtually non-evident in beginning speakers (Nguyen et al., 2008). Advanced speakers also showed difficulty in performing accurate reproductions of the timing contrast aspect of stress in spoken Australian English, but demonstrated a definite use of acoustical manipulation (Nguyen et al., 2008). This suggests a larger degree of cognitive adaptation than was described by Zhang et al. (2008).

Chapman (2007) strikes something of a middle ground between Zhang et al. (2008) and Nguyen et al. (2008) in his examination of discourse intonation and the practicality of teaching English intonation and stress patterns to Japanese students. Over a ten-year period of teaching and study, Chapman concluded that certain aspects of intonation and stress recognition can indeed be learned, even when the acoustical variations used to denote such differentiation in the target language are not present in — or are not emphasized as fully in — the native language of the speaker (Chapman, 2007). Other aspects of intonation and stress usage were too subtle to be practically taught to most students, suggesting a malleable but partially static cognitive process (Chapman, 2007). Though his study was limited to Japanese students of American English, Chapman asserts that his findings are applicable more broadly.

Suggestions that the processing of language and the malleability of the cognitive mechanisms governing its processing and acquisition later in life are somehow related to other cognitive processes are found in a study of six- to eight-year-old native Spanish speakers (Gutierrez-Palma et al., 2009). In an experiment that required the reading aloud of polysyllabic words and pseudowords, Gutierrez-Palma et al. (2009) determined that stress sensitivity was a primary factor in reading fluency. This has broader implications for the effect of stress and intonation recognition on overall learning ability and other cognitive processes, which, according to this study, might shape not only how, but also how well, things can be learned or communicated across cultures and in non-native languages (Gutierrez-Palma et al., 2009).

A groundbreaking study of German and French infants provides substantial evidence that stress pattern recognition develops with a preference for the target language even during pre-linguistic exposure (Hohle et al., 2009). Earlier studies had concluded that English infants developed a preference for trochaic words — the dominant stress construct of English — over iambic stress patterns within the first year of life (Hohle et al., 2009). A comparison of German and French infants across four distinct experiments confirms and narrows the timeframe in which this differentiation of preference occurs. It also demonstrates, through the French language experiments, that the ability to distinguish two opposing stress patterns does not necessarily result in the development of a preference, if the target language itself lacks a dominant stress structure (Hohle et al., 2009). Even at six months, a specific language begins to mediate perception.

An earlier study suggests that the timing of stress and intonation preference development is even sooner than six months. While citing evidence that language-independent phonetic contrasts and melodic variations are recognized within the first four months of life — and that language-specific recognition does not begin until after six months — Friederici et al. (2007) demonstrate, using German and French infants, that stress recognition is definitively language-specific by four months of age. Measurements of brain activity showed a clear spike when stress patterns of each infant's target language were heard, compared to opposing stress patterns (Friederici et al., 2007). This reveals not only a cognitive preference for the native language, but a neurological one, in infants as young as four months old.

Arciuli and Slowiaczek (2007) delve deeper into the neurological basis and mechanisms of language processing and stress preference by studying brain activity in adult subjects confronted with various word-naming and word-recognition tasks. The researchers found that stress typicality effects — the recognition and response to different stress patterns — arose only in the left hemisphere of the brain, even though language processing as a whole requires portions of both hemispheres (Arciuli & Slowiaczek, 2007). These results led the researchers to the tentative conclusions that stress patterns might actually precede lexical access in the process of word recognition, limiting the number of available words before other sounds are even considered, and that prosody and grammar are inextricably linked in the language processing system (Arciuli & Slowiaczek, 2007). This provides compelling evidence for the link between the cognitive mechanisms of language and the means of cultural identification and expression.

As extensions of basic biological constructs, the neurological factors underlying language are universal across cultures. For this reason, many behavioral scientists have concluded that the acquisition of language occurs at the same pace and by the same mechanisms in all cultures (Wyatt, 2007). Social avenues for the learning and reinforcement of language are largely the same across cultures, and combined with neurological and cognitive factors essentially universal to all of humanity, language development does appear to have the same basis and impetus everywhere (Wyatt, 2007). At the same time, linguistic differences between cultures utilize these universal mechanisms differently, resulting in different cognitive patterns becoming more readily available to adult speakers of a given language (Wyatt, 2007). The cultural similarities in the acquisition of language are thus offset by the cultural differences in its ultimate use and processing; language has a common basis, but not a common result.

Because of this, language has been shown to be a statistically significant measure of ethnic identity (Laroche et al., 2009). Though this may seem an incredibly simplistic conclusion on the surface, the scientific establishment of language as a valid construct of ethnic identity demonstrates its fundamentality to ethnicity and other measures and boundaries of culture (Laroche et al., 2009). Though long used as a conscious means of distinguishing between various groups of people, the scientific finding that linguistic differences function as primary markers of culture is truly significant.

Conclusion

Research specifically targeted at determining the link between the cultural and cognitive processes and mediating factors of language is still necessary for the furtherance of our understanding of one of the most complex yet most basic aspects of humanity. Language is more than simply a means of transmitting cultural models; it is an essential tool in the shaping of culture as well. This can make language an effective barrier to intercultural communication based solely on cognitive principles, but at the same time an open and adaptive use of language, coupled with a better understanding of its workings, could foster a new era of more effective multicultural communication.