The unspoken science of helping others

Each May, the University of Alberta celebrates Asian Heritage Month and the work of faculty, researchers, instructors and students who are demonstrating leadership in creating a world that is more equitable and inclusive — that uplifts the whole community, in all of its diversity.

Dr. Xiaoyun Wang, a researcher in applied linguistics and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of East Asian Studies, is uncovering how people across various cultures anticipate others’ needs in everyday interactions and use their own body language to offer help. Her work finding contrasts and similarities between native speakers and heritage- and second-language learners will lead to meaningful change in bridging language barriers and cultural differences. 

Xiaoyun’s postdoctoral project “An Eye on Help” focuses on Mandarin speakers, comparing the practices of heritage- and second-language learners with native speakers in Canada, where Mandarin is spoken predominantly at home by more than half a million people.

“I’m interested in those very brief moments when one person sees another struggling and decides how to respond,” says Xiaoyun, adding it could be as simple as holding open a door for a stranger, offering a colleague a glass of water or doing a puzzle with a friend and handing them the piece they’re looking for. These responses may occur through prosody (the rhythm and intonation of speech), gaze, gesture or the use of nearby objects. 

“Much existing work draws on European language data and seldom compares first-language with heritage [and second-language] speakers,” says Xiaoyun. “As a result, we have limited evidence across languages about which features of action organization are universal and which vary with language background.”

Xiaoyun, who earned her MA in the Department of East Asian Studies and PhD in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta, says the project will build on her previous research that analyzed how language was used in real interactions among international students in Beijing. This time she will recruit 30 adult participants from Edmonton and across Canada for in-person data collection at the U of A’s Chinese Multimodality Lab.

Like Xiaoyun’s earlier work, the project will use wearable eye-tracking glasses, made available by her supervisor Dr. Xiaoting Li through Xiaoting’s Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI)-funded project. This will differ from screen-based (stationary) eye-tracking systems – often used for linguistic and psychology fixed-stimulus research – which are secured to a monitor and capture where participants look on a screen. With screen-based eye-tracking systems, if subjects were asked to read a sentence, Xiaoyun could analyze what words they spend more time on. 

For this research, wearable eye-tracking glasses are more suitable, as participants will be in motion, collaboratively assembling standardized IKEA furniture sets in 60-90 minute sessions. Xiaoyun compares the video from wearable eye-tracking glasses to an informative eye-level GoPro camera, but with the recording occurring in the glasses she can examine participants’ gaze patterns and changes of direction marked by lines on the screen. Afterwards, the metadata will be investigated at the Chinese Multimodality Lab, a pioneer in applying wearable eye-tracking technology within the field of interactional linguistics in Canada. This approach is a rare combination, according to the 2025 Tobii Eye Tracking Research Report, an annual industry report that provides new trends on eye-tracking technology across research fields.

How people choose to communicate is based on their history of language acquisition, and there are challenges for heritage- and second-language learners. Their speech and body movement may not align in the same way as a native speaker – for instance, their speech might come from Canadian language structure and body language from Chinese cultural norms – Xiaoyun predicts. There may also be multiple combinations, as social action itself could be considered a blend of both Canadian and Chinese norms.

“The project provides interactional evidence that multilingualism is not only linguistic mixing, but multimodal recombination that includes nonverbal resources,” explains Xiaoyun. Alongside its linguistic contribution, she says the broader goal for her research is to better understand communication across different language backgrounds in Canada’s multilingual society, and how it operates every day to navigate unfamiliar ways to support each other. 

Xiaoyun’s research will offer multiple insights, including a practical workshop to help teachers understand how to organize classroom interactions based on specific language behaviours – and therefore encourage equitable engagement. She will submit a bilingual language report on how people from different backgrounds work together to the Alberta Association of Immigrant Serving Agencies and Career Development Association of Alberta to raise awareness and give practitioners a closer look at what evidence-based cross-cultural collaboration actually looks like.

Trying to understand people’s feelings and wanting to help is a shared experience, says Xiaoyun. It’s fundamental to comprehending the bigger picture about universal human communication.