Dr. Jessica Gasiorek, Professor of Communicology, is working on a line of research on code-mixing and processing fluency. The impetus to explore this topic came from seeing public-facing messages at UH in English with Hawaiian words embedded within them. This led her to wonder whether different members of heterogeneous audiences process these messages differently, and how this might affect their responses to those messages. So Gasiorek, along with her colleague Dr. Marko Dragojevic at the University of Kentucky, designed a study to examine the effects of code mixing on people’s processing fluency (i.e., how effortful was it to process the messages) as well as people’s perceptions of inclusivity (i.e., how welcoming people thought the source of the message was).
To explore these questions, Gasiorek and her colleague created three versions of fictional announcements for student clubs: all English; code mixing with glosses (where code-mixed words were followed by translations in parentheses); and code mixing without such translations. Students at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa as well as the University of Kentucky read the different versions of the announcements and then completed questionnaires measuring perceived processing fluency and perceived inclusivity. The results showed that for both local and Kentucky students, code-mixed messages without translations were the most difficult to process. Kentucky students found code-mixed messages with glosses more difficult to process than all-English texts. In contrast, for Hawaiʻi students, there was no difference between English-only messages and the code-mixed messages with glosses. Both Hawaiʻi and Kentucky students reported that they would feel more welcome in organizations that used code-mixed messages with glosses (translations), relative to code mixing without glosses. A follow up study is being planned with a different language and environment – English-Spanish code-mixing (“Spanglish”) in Arizona.
Gasiorek and her colleague also conducted a related study on English-Hawaiian code mixing in promotional materials for tourism. This study utilized publicly available online materials to examine whether code mixing affects processing fluency and audience interest in advertised activities. This study sampled adults from the mainland U.S. and found that code mixing does result in decreased processing fluency for these potential tourists. However, code mixing also appears to boost interest – creating a trade-off that advertisers may want to consider.
Extending this research to different languages and cultures, and exploring additional outcomes such as organizational inclusiveness will aid our understanding of the effects of different kinds of language use. How do people respond to these different messages? What do people think about the senders of these different messages? These and other important questions will continue to be explored. We look forward to learning more about this fascinating line of research, Dr. Gasiorek!