How Has COVID-19 Impacted Our Language Use?

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to severe consequences for people’s mental health. The pandemic has also influenced our language use, shaping our word formation habits. The overuse of new metaphorical meanings has received particular attention from the media. Here, we wanted to investigate whether these metaphors have led to the formation of new semantic associations in memory. A sample of 120 university students was asked to decide whether a target word was or was not related to a prime stimulus. Responses for pandemic pairs in which the target referred to the newly acquired metaphorical meaning of the prime (i.e., “trench”—“hospital”) were compared to pre-existing semantically related pairs (i.e., “trench”—“soldier”) and neutral pairs (i.e., “trench”—“response”). Results revealed greater accuracy and faster response times for pandemic pairs than for semantic pairs and for semantic pairs compared to neutral ones. These findings suggest that the newly learned pandemic associations have created stronger semantic links in our memory compared to the pre-existing ones. Thus, this work confirms the adaptive nature of human language, and it underlines how the overuse of metaphors evoking dramatic images has been, in part, responsible for many psychological disorders still reported among people nowadays.

Keystrokes: A practical exploration of semantic drift in timed word association tasks

“…A large word association study by Laurino et al [ 34 ] found that even in a relatively short time, the company that words keep can change, finding that as compared to the words used before the COVID-19 pandemic, words used during the pandemic led to new associations, such as the word strain , which in pre-COVID associations had more frequently been associated with wine , while during the pandemic it found itself in the company of decidedly less Bacchic neighbors, including mutations and antibiotics . Indeed, similar results were found in several other COVID related studies, reinforcing the speed with which semantic drift can erode and reform the semantic landscape [ 35 – 37 ]. But semantic drift is far from limited to large scale, environmental change, and is as normal an occurrence in the blogosphere [ 38 ] as it is in many a regular conversation [ 39 ].…”

‘We are all in the same boat’: a qualitative cross-sectional analysis of COVID-19 pandemic imagery in scientific literature and its use for people working in the German healthcare sector

“…Only few empirical studies have looked at the effects of imagery on the recipient during the COVID-19 pandemic and it is therefore still an open question, how imagery affects the perception of the pandemic. Pisano and colleagues ( 27 ) demonstrated that participants had formed new semantic associations (e.g., “trench”—”hospital”) during the pandemic, that were stronger and more readily available than classical associations (e.g., “trench”—”soldier”). Further research showed that, by experimentally creating and comparing different news articles about the pandemic, the inclusion of metaphors in the articles predicted greater self-efficacy in readers ( 28 ).…”

The Impact of COVID-19 Lockdown Measures and COVID-19 Infection on Cognitive Functions: A Review in Healthy and Neurological Populations

“…Indeed, higher levels of anxiety, depression, and stress have been recorded during the confinement period compared to the pre-COVID-19 emergency, disrupting the balance of daily activities and the perception of well-being in both healthy people [ 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 ] and people with neurological conditions [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 ]. Lockdown measures imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic also caused cognitive changes in different populations [ 20 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 ]. For instance, in Nogueira et al’s study [ 28 ], a deterioration of cognitive flexibility and processing speed compared to pre-COVID-19 confinement was detected in a group of healthy subjects.…”