Effects of written code-mixing on processing fluency and perceptions of organizational inclusiveness

ABSTRACT

Participants read English-based online texts from fictional organizations that either included no code-mixing, Hawaiian words without glosses (i.e., parenthetical translations), or Hawaiian words with English glosses. Relative to no code-mixing, code-mixing without glosses disrupted processing fluency, leading participants to feel less welcome in the organization. Code-mixing with glosses did not disrupt fluency for participants from Hawai‘i, where this practice is common, but did for people from elsewhere. No differences in feeling welcome emerged between code-mixing with glosses and no code-mixing conditions. These results suggest that code-mixing in written organizational materials can have both costs (i.e., disrupted fluency) and benefits (i.e., cueing inclusiveness), and that these effects depend on audiences’ familiarity with code-mixing as a practice, and the format of code-mixing.

KEYWORDS:

• Code-mixing
• processing fluency
• metacognition
• code-switching
• intergroup
• social identity

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the two community members who generously shared their expertise in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i (the Hawaiian language) in the process of creating study materials, as well as the three anonymous reviewers who provided helpful and constructive feedback in the review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data underlying this article will be shared on reasonable request to the corresponding author.

Notes

1 Excluding participants who identified as Native Hawaiian (N = 39) did not change the pattern of results for language condition, location, or their interaction for either outcome (i.e., processing fluency or feeling welcome). Hawaiian language proficiency was no longer significant predictor of feeling welcome (F(1, 473) = 1.60, p = .210) without Native Hawaiian participants; there were no changes to the (nonsignificant) effect of language proficiency on processing fluency.

2 We acknowledge that for organizations that have specific political or philosophical reasons for using language in other ways – for example, as an overt expression of identity, or as a form of protest against the dominance of English and its corresponding social group(s) – these reasons may override the considerations related to processing fluency and communication effectiveness that we present here.