THE EFFECTS OF AI-POWERED LANGUAGE TRANSLATION ON HUMAN COMMUNICATION: A PSYCHOLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

The current study has examined the psycholinguistic impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based language translation on human patterns of communication using a mixed-methods research study design of 240 participants. This study investigated the cognitive load, grammatical accuracy, and reading comprehension levels where participants interacted with three AI-based translation tools, which were Google Translate, DeepL, and Microsoft Translator. The nature of participants involved the same number of native and non-native English speakers aged between 18 to 65 years whom were recruited via stratified random sampling in six months. Data was gathered with the help of standardized psycholinguistic tests, the semi-structured interviews, and the controlled experiments where the human-translated and AI-translated content were compared. Findings showed that there was a great variance in the cognitive processing pattern as the AI- translated content reported 78 percent semantic accuracy against 94 percent in human translation. The participants experienced higher cognitive burden processing AI translations both in longer reaction times, as well as, shifted eye-tracking patterns. Stemming out of qualitative analysis, there were themes of adaptive communication practices and subjects relating to dependency issues on the part of users. The researchers have concluded that the introduction of AI translation tools made the communicative process more accessible but distorted natural language processing mechanisms and changed how people communicate. The research implication of the findings is educational policy through establishing cross-cultural communication guidelines and implementation of more psycholinguistically-sensitive AI translation applications that are more aligned to human cognition.