The shifting tipping point - one metaphor, many uses

To understand what a metaphor is, let’s start by considering a real world example. For tipping point, we might imagine an object that should be kept upright, such as a vase of flowers, at risk of falling when it loses its centre of gravity. As the tipping point is not the vase’s natural state, we assume something has caused the unbalance e.g. a curious cat, or an earthquake. We also realise that there will be consequences when this tipping point is reached, and we expect these will be negative. The glass is likely to smash, causing danger to bare feet, and destroying the vase. The contents will also spill onto the floor, possibly spreading water and causing further damage, or possibly partly retrievable if some of the flowers can be rescued. But we recognise that reaching the tipping point is very unlikely to have many positive outcomes, as it takes us from our pretty vase of flowers, to an undesirable mess on the floor.

The job of a metaphor is to map the knowledge we have from these real-world examples, onto something else. But whereas the source domain of a metaphor relates to concrete entities (such as the unlucky vase), the target domain will be a more abstract and complex phenomenon. Therefore, how the metaphor is used - the linguistic and discursive context - will help to shape how we conceptualise this target.

From the 1960s onwards, tipping point was regularly mapped onto moments of social change, most popularly in the early 2000s to describe the sudden spread of a new trend or idea in society. Conventionally, tipping point came to be used as an everyday expression meaning a time of important, often uncontrollable, things happening that lead to change. It was most often applied to an individual, reaching a personal tipping point and joining a wider group or process in society. Notably, the more negative interpretations were largely removed, and the metaphor was seen as more exciting than threatening. Over time, the metaphorical mapping had therefore become somewhat ‘bleached’ of its source domain.

But from 2004 scientists began to use this metaphor in relation to the world’s climate, and it is now common to hear and read about ecological tipping points in the media. Van der Hel, Hellsten & Steen (2018) examined 326 articles from major world newspapers, and 301 scientific articles, to see how this metaphor developed and was used from 2005-2014. They looked for both the discursive context of the metaphor (Who is using the phrase? What is it being used to refer to?) and the linguistic characteristics of its use (How is the phrase combined with different parts of speech and punctuation? Is the use of the phrase deliberately metaphorical?) From this study they tracked the changing use and meanings of tipping point in both the media and science.

The metaphor was first used by scientists as an attempt to explain to the media their complex research into abrupt changes in the climate system. Use of the phrase at this time drew attention to its metaphorical meaning, rather than the conventional one, by also expressing related ideas of falling, danger and irreversibility. By making explicit references to the source domain in this way, the metaphorical meaning is more ‘deliberate’, and actively encourages us to reflect more on the concrete meaning of the expression. Therefore the metaphor highlighted the serious and threatening nature of a tipping point and, by extension, the catastrophic issue of climate change.

Until this time tipping point in climate change news articles had mainly been used in the conventional sense, to refer to changes in individual social attitudes towards the environment. But from 2005-2007 the phrase began to appear more frequently in inverted commas, to note its increasing, and unfamiliar, use by scientists. The phrase also began to be used in reference to humanity as a whole, in contrast to the previous convention of usually referring to an individual in society. This use of punctuation and the new collocations again serve to focus attention on the metaphorical status of the phrase. In doing so, a reader may be encouraged to draw deeper on their source domain knowledge, and reconsider the metaphor’s meaning.

Within the scientific community, use of the metaphor continued to increase from 2008. But whereas it may have begun as a rhetorical device, it subsequently became a mainstream scientific concept, and a theoretical tool. The imagery of a tipping point largely replaced some earlier metaphors (e.g. thresholds), and studies explored what the causes and outcomes of different potential tipping points might mean in various climate contexts. This suggests an inspirational role for the metaphor, through capturing the imagination of scientists, and opening new directions for studies.In contrast, the media used the metaphor less after 2007, but it re-emerged from 2011 in news reports from political speeches at international climate conferences. In these reports, it was increasingly tied to specific locations (e.g. the Amazon) and events, and was often still expressed using inverted commas. However the phrase also began to be used for other, non-climate related changes, such as sudden policy shifts. This suggests that the tipping point metaphor in the media had become more flexible, again incorporating the conventional expression of a drastic change.

This study shows that in science and the media, a metaphor can help explain complex ideas, and encourage new ways of thinking about a phenomenon. It also demonstrates their versatility: tracing how a metaphor that had become an everyday expression was mapped onto a new target domain, leading to a restructured understanding. By examining the linguistic and discursive contexts of tipping point, Van der Hel, Hellsten & Steen (2018) highlight the numerous and changing roles that metaphors can play, and how they can help scientists and journalists in public debates on important topics.

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van der Hel, S., Hellsten, I. and Steen, G., 2018. Tipping points and climate change: Metaphor between science and the media. Environmental Communication, 12(5), pp.605-620.

This summary was written by Sarah Kirk-Browne

The Power of Babble

"Ma-ma, ba-ba, da-da" - you probably associate sounds such as these with babies, in particular the babbling that babies make when they're first acquiring language. But what do these sounds do? And why do babies babble? This is a question that some recent research has addressed.

In their recent research report, Elminger, Schwade and Goldstein examined the function of babbling in infants’ language development.  They explored the idea that a caregiver’s response to their child’s vocalizations is key to the beginnings of communication and found that infants themselves may actually be in charge of this process.  By 5 months old, babies will babble and expect their adult caregiver to reply and by 9 months, they will begin to produce more speech-like noise once the adult responds to them.  Previous research has suggested that parents’ speech will match the child’s current age, changing as the child grows.  A baby’s most varied ‘pre-speech’ repertoire of sounds is between 9-10 months and this is when a parent’s speech is most sensitive to their child’s vocalizations.

The researchers focused on this age group and were interested in further investigating the relationship between the adults’ and infants’ vocalizations by closely examining adult speech in response to infant babble. They used three measures to assess the type of speech parents used to respond to babbling:  Firstly, they counted the number of different types of words that were used; secondly, they counted the average number of words in the responses and thirdly, they calculated how many of these responses were just a single word.  There were thirty mother-infant pairs who participated in the study and they were recorded in a naturalistic environment, as the child played, over two thirty minute sessions.  The researchers split the adult responses into two different categories: ‘contingent’ which were immediate, direct responses to the child’s babble and ‘non-contingent’ which did not occur within two seconds of the babbling.

Overall, the investigation showed that the mothers produced less contingent than non-contingent speech and that the contingent speech consisted of significantly shorter utterances with simpler words.  They also found that there were more single-word contingent utterances than non-contingent. So, in general, it seems that parents may simplify the whole structure of their speech in response to their child’s babble, suggesting that infant babbling really does influence the adult response. It may be that this immature, pre-speech babble is actually engineered by the child to create language learning opportunities through eliciting simplified, easy-to-learn responses from their caregiver.  In fact, it seems that infant babbling in general is indicative that learning is happening:  It has previously been found that infants more accurately remember the features of objects at which they have babbled than those that have been looked at and handled but not babbled at.  So, when an adult responds vocally to babbling, the already alert child will quickly learn the patterns of their speech. 

Overall, these results show that children learn to recognise language much more quickly when the information they need to do so is presented immediately on babbling.  During the first year of their life, infants associate their babbling with a response from their caregiver which will guide their learning and speech development.  So, unlike the Tower of Babel,  fabled to have been built to divide people linguistically, in this study the power of babble is shown to rely on infant and caregiver closely working together.

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Elmlinger S.L.; J.A. Schwade & M.H. Goldstein. 2019. The Ecology of prelinguistic vocal learning: parents simplify the structure of their speech in response to babbling. Journal of Child Language. 16:1-14.

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

doi: 10.1017/S0305000919000291

Accent Bias: Voices at Work

Continuing our series of posts related to the 'Accent Bias in Britain' project, in this blog post we discuss some findings from our research which investigated current attitudes to accents in Britain.

In our last blog post, we explored some of the findings of the second part of our study which investigated how the UK public evaluated 5 different accents in mock interviews. The third part of our study, detailed here, investigated whether people in positions of power such as recruiters would exhibit the same type of accent biases. 

Our study focuses on a profession that has been previously described as lacking diversity, Law. We were interested in examining whether accent bias interferes with judgements of professional skill. In other words, would a candidate with, say a Multicultural London English accent, be perceived as less professional or competent as their Received Pronunciation speaking peers? 

To investigate this question, we played the same mock interviews as described in our last blog post to 61 legal professionals.We prepared 10 short mock interview answers, varying between ‘good’ and ‘poor’ quality. Before we conducted the experiment, these answers were independently judged as 'good' or 'poor' by a group of 25 legal professionals otherwise unrelated to the project.

To create the mock interviews, we had 10 speakers (2 of each accent) record 10 good and 10 poor interview responses. This resulted in 100 recordings. The accents we tested were: Multicultural London English (MLE), Estuary English (EE), Received Pronunciation (RP), General Northern English (GNE), and Urban West Yorkshire English (UWYE). 

From the 100 recordings, our 61 legal professionals heard a random selection of 10 interview answers. They were then asked to evaluate whether they thought the answer was a 'good' answer or a 'poor' answer. They were asked to indicate this on a 10-point scale, responding to the following questions:

1. “How would you rate the overall quality of the candidate’s answer?”
2. “Does the candidate’s answer show relevant expertise and knowledge?”
3. “In your opinion, how likely is it that the candidate will succeed as a lawyer?”
4. “Is the candidate somebody that you personally would like to work with?”
5. “How likely would you be to recommend hiring this candidate?”

When we analysed our data, we identified a surprising effect. Whilst the general public displayed a great deal of accent bias in judging the competency of a job candidate, the lawyers did not follow this pattern. In fact, the professions did not show significant preferences for Received Pronunciation (RP) or General Northern English (GNE), nor did they show a consistent dispreference for working class or non-white accents. Instead, they showed a consistent ability to judge the quality of an answer as 'good' or 'poor' regardless of the accent the answer was presented to them in. Their answers very closely matched the answers given by the group of professionals who rated the quality of the written answers. 

The graph above shows this effect. The high quality answers are in yellow and the lower quality answers are in green. As you should be able to see, across the five different accents (see the x-axis on the bottom), the ratings remain relatively the same. At the same time, however, it is worth noting that EE & MLE receive the lowest ratings of all the accents. 

Note, however, that RP is also lower rated than some of the other accents. This is surprising given that RP was evaluated as the most prestigious accent in the label study. It's possible that this ranking might be related to the association of RP with a higher level of education, so there is a greater expectation of these individuals. 

It is also interesting to note that some of the social factors seen to effect the general public's responses do not seem to influence the professional's judgements. The age and regional origin of  legal professionals did not affect how they responded to job candidates, unlike what we found among the general public. Their Motivation to Control a Prejudiced Response (MCPR) - a psychological factor that had a strong effect on how listeners behaved in our public survey - also did not effect their ratings. 

Our findings therefore suggest that when legal professionals are asked to judge the suitability of a candidate, they are able to switch off biases and attend very well to the quality of an answer, judging the competency of the individual independently of their accent. 

Of course, however, the current study simulates just one small part of hiring candidates. It doesn't look at accent bias in other aspects of professional life, like informal interaction during the interview or everyday experiences on the job. So, it's possible that accent bias might influence the candidate's progression later on down the line. 

At least in terms of hiring though, it looks like it's relatively good news for speakers of regional and 'non-standard' accents! 

This summary was written by Christian Ilbury

Accent Bias: Responses to Voices

Continuing our series of posts related to the 'Accent Bias in Britain' project, in this blog post we discuss some findings from our research which investigated current attitudes to accents in Britain.

In the most recent blog post, we explored the findings of the first part of our study which investigated attitudes to accent labels. The second part of our study, detailed here, investigated how people responded to recordings of speakers with different accents to see if the same accent bias exists in speech. 

To examine these questions, we recorded 10 speakers of 5 different accents (2 speakers each). These accents were Multicultural London English (MLE), Estuary English (EE), Received Pronunciation (RP), General Northern English (GNE), and Urban West Yorkshire English (UWYE). Speakers of these accents were recorded reading scripted mock interview answers. 

These recordings were then played to over 1,100 participants aged between 18-79 from across the country. The sample of participants was balanced for both ethnicity and gender. 

For each of the 10 mock interview answers the participants heard, they were asked to evaluate the candidate's performance, knowledge, suitability, and hireability for a job. Participants were asked to rate the candidate on a 10-point scale - where 10 is the highest. They were asked to respond to questions such as:

1. “How would you rate the overall quality of the candidate's answer?”
2. “Does the candidate's answer show expert knowledge?”
3. “How likely is it that the candidate will succeed as a lawyer?”
4. “Is the candidate somebody that you personally would like to work with?”
5. “How would you rate the candidate overall?”

The participants also provided information on their age, social background, and education. 

When we analysed the results, we found a significant effect of the listener's age. Older listeners generally rated the two southern accents (MLE and EE) lower than all of the other accents. Younger participants, however, did not show this pattern. 

You can see this effect in the graph below. On the right are the older participants and on the left, the younger participants. The higher the line, the more positive the evaluation. As one can see, the ratings drop when you move from the younger respondents to their older peers. 

Is accent bias decreasing or is this just 'age-grading'?

This could mean one of two things. It could be that general attitudes to accents are changing, such that younger listeners will continue to exhibit the same accent preferences later on in life. On the other hand, it's possible that this could be evidence of age-grading. This is where young people might be more tolerant of accent diversity in their early years but become more critical as they get older.

A second finding of this study was that people's evaluations of accents in the responses to the interview questions depends on the type of question being answered. In questions that require a degree of technical or specialist knowledge, like those questions which asked specific details about law, all accents were rated more favourably. In more general questions, such as those which asked personal details or the work experience of the candidate, the accents were downrated much more.

Degree of expertise and accent rating

The effect of the 'expertise' required is shown in the graph above. The yellow line indicates 'expert' answers and the green line indicates 'non-expert' answers. As you should be able to see, all accents are rated much lower when the answer is a 'non-expert' answer than for an 'expert' answer. 

We also asked participants a series of questions aimed to test how prejudiced they were. We proposed that the more prejudiced people were, the lower their ratings of the different accents would be. In fact, this is exactly what we find. See the graph below. 

More prejudiced listeners were more likely to downrate all of the accents  

Those who reported they were more likely to be prejudiced towards different accents showed much lower ratings than those who were more likely to control their prejudice. The graph above shows ratings depending on MCPR (Motivation to Control a Prejudice Response). The blue line is those who reported that they are not prejudiced towards different accents, whereas the green line is those who report exhibiting more prejudice. 

What these results suggest is that there is a a systematic bias against certain accents in England (particularly Southern working-class varieties), whereas RP is evaluated much more positively and is perceived to be the most suitable for professional employment.

However, these results are reported for the general public. Would we see the same types of evaluations amongst those who are responsible for hiring candidates? In the next blog post, we explore this question. In the meantime, you can find our more about the project by visiting the project website. 

This summary was written by Christian Ilbury

Teach Real English!

Did you know that as well as the 'Research Digest', we also maintain the 'Teach Real English!' site?

Our site is an archive of spoken English Language Teaching resources that have been developed by Linguists at Queen Mary University of London. Our website includes: 

• A database of spoken English (containing sound clips and transcripts)

• Language Investigations for exploring the English language in every day situations

• A range of Teaching Units designed to offer secondary school teachers of English language up-to-date examples of English language use

• Glossaries and descriptions of spoken English features

The materials have been designed for teachers of GCSE and GCE A-Level English Language, but they may be useful for anyone involved in teaching spoken English language.

If you have already used our resource, we'd love to hear your feedback! We are regularly asked to report on usage of the materials we create, so would greatly appreciate you filling in our survey.