How do people from different cultures convey information? Do they do it mainly through overt expressions or subtle, contextual cues? One well-known approach, introduced by Edward T. Hall in 1976, categorizes cultures into “low-context” (like Swiss Germans, Germans, and Scandinavians, who prefer clear, explicit communication) and “high-context” (such as Japanese and Chinese, who often imply more than they say outright). But until now, there hasn’t been much solid evidence to back up these ideas.
With a team of talented and enthusiastic young researchers at Radboud University (the Netherlands) and the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil) we have been working on finding empirical support for these ideas. The aim of one of our projects is to analyse how different languages describe events, focusing on such aspects as the agent, time reference and the source of information. We’re collecting and analyzing corpus data in different languages using a universal annotation schema. We’re also planning to use AI, specifically Large Language Models, to spot patterns of implicit information across languages and cultures.
With this study, we hope to understand how people from different cultures and speaking different languages interpret and communicate information differently.
On this page I’ll publish updates to our project. Stay tuned!
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