Three- and 4-year-old Asian-American and Caucasian-American children were asked to judge which of a set of three lines was the longest, both independently and in the face of an inaccurate consensus among informants. Half of the children made their judgments privately; the other half made their judgments with the experimenter present. In the private setting, children were mostly resistant to the incorrect testimony from the consensus. By contrast, in the public setting, children were more deferential, less willing to explicitly judge (...) the consensus members as incorrect, and more likely to misremember the consensus as having made accurate line judgments. Confirming earlier findings, deference to the consensus was greater among Asian-American children. First-generation Asian-American children were especially deferential in the public setting. (shrink)

Harbin is a city in Northeast China that rose to prominence as a result of the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway in a context of Russian imperial expansion. Affectionately known as “the Moscow of the East,” Harbin’s history, architecture, food, and language bear strong Russian/Soviet influences. Given the joint Chinese and Russian/European influences, Harbin represents a dynamic, hybridized, and liminal space. Adopting the conceptual lenses of “chronotope” and “polyphony,” this study explores the linguistic and semiotic landscape of the famous (...) Saint Sophia Cathedral (an Eastern Orthodox church) and Zhongyang Street/Central Street (a Russian-style pedestrian street) in Harbin. Historically, these areas once featured highly Russified linguistic/semiotic landscape, which later saw significant de-Russification as many Russians left and a Chinese identity was emphasized. In recent decades, Russian linguistic and semiotic elements are deliberately foregrounded and strategically employed in a context of tourism, commerce, and business. Drawing on a corpus of photographic data, the study examines the combination and orchestration of multilingual signs (i.e., Chinese, English, and Russian), investigates issues of translation, and explores how the multilingual signs, various architectural styles (of Russian/European origins), various products (e.g., Russian-style khleb, kvass, and Matryoshka dolls) and spatiotemporal elements give rise to dynamic semiotic assemblages. Its findings reveal how such multimodal and multisemiotic ensembles construct a sense of authenticity and exoticness and importantly contribute to the commodification of Harbin. These lead to a diverse and cosmopolitan image, a hybrid East-meets-West urban identity and a layered urban palimpsest. This interdisciplinary study contributes to scholarship in multilingualism, linguistic/semiotic landscape, the commodification of language, multimodal discourse analysis, urban studies, urban geography, and sociolinguistics. (shrink)

This study seeks to understand how citizens’ more intrinsic cultural orientations shape their attitudes toward the importance of ethics. Drawing upon the Grid-Group Cultural Theory, we investigate how four different cultural orientations influence citizens’ attitudes toward ethics in distinctive ways. Our multivariate analysis of the survey responses of 1,260 Seoul citizens revealed that strong hierarchs, egalitarians, and individualists are more likely to recognize the importance and necessity of public ethics. Fatalist orientation, however, did not show a statistically significant relationship with (...) the importance and necessity of public ethics. It was individualism that exerted the most significant influence over the importance of ethics in personal life, while the perception of the importance of ethics in the public sector and the necessity for ethics training for public officials were found to be mostly supported by strong hierarchs. We conclude this paper by discussing the theoretical and practical ramifications of these findings. (shrink)

Refusal is considered a face-threatening act (FTA), since it contradicts the inviter’s expectations. In the case of Japanese, native speakers (NS) are known to prefer to leave sentences unfinished for a conventional indirect refusal. Successful comprehension of this indirect refusal depends on whether the addressee is fully conventionalized to the preference for syntactic unfinishedness so that they can identify the true intention of the refusal. Then, non-native speakers (NNS) who are not fully accustomed to the convention may be confused by (...) the indirect style. In the present study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) of electroencephalography in an attempt to differentiate the neural substrates for perceiving unfinished sentences in a conventionalized indirect refusal as an FTA between NS and NNS, in terms of the unfinishedness and indirectness of the critical sentence. In addition, we examined the effects of individual differences in mentalization, or the theory of mind, which refers to the ability to infer the mental states of others. We found several different ERP effects for these refusals between NS and NNS. NNS induced stronger P600 effects for the unfinishedness of the refusal sentences, suggesting their perceived syntactic anomaly. This was not evoked in NS. NNS also revealed the effects of N400 and P300 for the indirectness of refusal sentences, which can be interpreted as their increased processing load for pragmatic processing in the inexperienced contextual flow. We further found that the NNS’s individual mentalizing ability correlates with the effect of N400 mentioned above, indicating that lower mentalizers evoke higher N400 for indirect refusal. NS, on the contrary, did not yield these effects reflecting the increased pragmatic processing load. Instead, they evoked earlier ERPs of early posterior negativity (EPN) and P200, both of which are known as indices of emotional processing, for finished sentences of refusal than for unfinished ones. We interpreted these effects as a NS’s dispreference for finished sentences to realize an FTA, given that unfinished sentences are considered more polite and more conventionalized in Japanese social encounters. Overall, these findings provide evidence that a syntactic anomaly inherent in a cultural convention as well as individual mentalizing ability plays an important role in understanding an indirect speech act of face-threatening refusal. (shrink)