‘And where is the Lebanon?’ A socio-psycholinguistic investigation of comprehension and intelligibility of news

Abstract

Starting from a discussion of language and power in the tradition of sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic research, the results of a large project on the comprehension of radio news are presented. The understanding of news was tested with a large sample of persons of all age groups, social classes and the two genders. The paraphrases and recall were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. It could be shown that large speech and comprehension barriers exist. In a second stage, in-depth interviews were held with a sample of 50 persons to be able to understand better the reasons for misunderstanding and lack of understanding. Motivation, interests, knowledge, schemas and scripts, and the interaction of news in everyday life were studied and correlated with the test results. We could show that both psychological and sociological factors were extremely relevant to the process of discourse comprehension. The third stage in this study consisted of the construction of ' ‘alternative news'. We produced news with the same topic, but presented in a more cohesive and coherent form than the original. When confronted with ' ‘real news’ in this form, more persons understood the news better. However, the language barriers grew larger: working-class people and people with strong prejudices, little motivation, etc., understood even less.

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