The Effect Of Verbal Imitation On Praises And Criticisms

This study investigated the effects of verbal imitation on the perlocutionary effects of praises and criticisms: whether verbal imitation could influence imitators’ reaction to praises and criticisms,whether the effect of verbal imitation could be modulated by the categories of praises and criticisms,and to what extent the effect of verbal imitation(if present)could generalize from the imitatee to a new speaker.Answers to these research questions have been inspired by studies into nonverbal imitation.Some studies found that nonverbal imitation could arouse empathy,especially affective empathy,which leads to an increase in prosocial tendency between participants and even toward others in general.This suggested that verbal imitation,as imitation of nonverbal behavior,may have a similar effect of establishing empathy and then promoting prosocial tendency.Also,the effect of verbal imitation may generalize as nonverbal imitation does.This,however,remained to be empirically tested.To probe into the effects of verbal imitation,the participants’ responses toward praises and criticisms were elicited in our study.Such responses can be viewed as the perlocutionary effects of speech in the framework of the speech act theory(Austin,1975).Some research suggests that criticisms are usually perceived as negative and unpleasant whereas praises positive and pleasant,and praises and criticisms may thus have differently valenced perlocutionary effects.Indirect evidence in existing literature suggests that the perlocutionary effects of praises and criticisms could be modulated by the categories of the statements(e.g.,appearance and personality),with statements concerning personality mattering more than appearance to people.Therefore,to investigate the role of verbal imitation on participants’ reaction toward praises and criticisms,we asked participants to perform a statement rating task on pleasantness and truthfulness after they imitated or read aloud a passage.To investigate the role of valences in modulating the effect of verbal imitation on participants’ reaction toward speech acts,the valence of statements heard by participants was manipulated,i.e.,praises or criticisms.To investigate the role of categories of statements,participants’ responses to statements of appearance and personality were compared.To examine whether the effect of verbal imitation would generalize from imitatees to others,this study decided to use audio materials of same statements recorded by two speakers,i.e.,the imitatee and a new speaker.Results demonstrated that verbal imitation could influence participants’ reaction to praises and criticisms in terms of pleasantness.Imitators could feel less unpleasant to criticisms and less pleasant to praises,compared with the participants in the read-aloud condition.Moreover,such effects could generalize from the imitate to new speakers.Such effect was not found in truthfulness ratings.Results of our study evidenced the decisive role of affective empathy in affecting the perlocutionary effects of praises and criticisms,which may help clarify the social consequences of verbal imitation.This study also conveyed implications on language teaching and learning.