Listener's Attention Research Articles

日本手話談話における空間と視点

When we talk about a character's spatial relationships in a story, we sometimes build a space in front of our body so that the listeners will develop an image of the narrative world. In this study, I observe the way space and viewpoint are used in Japanese signed narrative discourse. For analysis, I used published data on signed narratives. I had three focuses when analyzing the data: (1) how the narrators introduce characters in a signed narrative space, (2) how they keep the space, and (3) how they managed the viewpoint to represent character's relationship during the narration. I analyzed gaze behavior and body direction in the data using gesture studies and conversation analysis perspective, viewpoint of speaker and activity involvement. From detailed case study, I found that the signers had their own ways of maintaining this space and keeping the imagined world in the signer's mind. The narrators maintained the space consistently, and all of the signs were designed in relation to this space. For example, when the speaker shifted to another character's perspective, to represent his or her utterances, he or she kept the spatial relationship in the narrative space. While using the space, the narrators directed their gaze and body to two main places: the narrative space and the listener's face. When they looked at the narrative space, they could draw the listener's attention to that space, and when they looked at the listener's face, they could monitor his or her reactions. In conclusion, I found that the signer's gaze behavior and body direction served not only as a grammatical element in sign language but also to regulate signed conversation.

Hwang Chin-i

Hwang Chin-i Hong Sŏk-chung (bio) and Ju-Chan Fulton (bio) Translated by Bruce Fulton It was a day of cloud and wind, the time of year when summer begins to give way to autumn, and already a few leaves were dropping from branches to be sent whirling into the sky. From South Gate a flock of dusky sparrows took flight, looping about the slate-gray sky above Pujung before scattering like a shower of dark hail among the paddies and dry fields beyond the city wall to feast upon the nearly ripened grain. Overhead a lone crow uttered an eerie caw, drawing looks of displeasure from passersby who then answered this ill-omened bird by spitting over their shoulders. There was a desolate feel to the day. Since early morning, would-be spectators had been gathering along the gully between the foot of Chanam Mountain and the wall behind Hwang Chinsa's dwelling in anticipation of the funeral procession for young Ttobok of Granary Row. Word had gotten out that the pallbearers would likely be passing this way, for the lane that ran along the gully was filled before the morning sun had crested the ridges, and the mountainside as far as Prominence Rock now wore a snowy blanket of onlookers garbed in their traditional white attire. For days now the dwellings of Pujung—the quarters of the menfolk, the womenfolk, and the hired help alike—had been abuzz with talk of Chin-i and Ttobok of Granary Row. Ears perked up at [End Page 155] the story of how this son of a minor official had fallen for the only daughter of a yangban family, of how his heart had finally broken when his love went unanswered, of how he was now a wandering ghost, but what really drew the attention of listeners was the news that in a single morning the engagement of the yangban's daughter had been broken off by the family of student Yun of Hanyang and that her status had suddenly fallen to the level of a slave girl's. Herein lay the reason for the burst of activity displayed by the people of Pujung from the first light of dawn, even those sluggards loath to stir from home, once it was known that the young man's bier would pass by the young lady's house. The previous night Old Granny had lingered outside the paper-paneled sliding door to Chin-i's room, worry creasing her face, before finally venturing across the threshold. "I know I shouldn't be bothering you at a time like this, but I don't know what else I can do. It's just that I'm afraid Nomi will get to fussing and fighting and make a big scene. And when I mention this to him, he's not about to listen." "What do you mean?" "Well, if you can believe it, people are already staking out a place for themselves out back to watch tomorrow morning when they come by with the body of the Granary Row boy. That's made Nomi as mad as a snake, and he's hissing that he's going to round up the tough guys from the kisaeng quarters, tear the onlookers limb from limb, and chase them away. I don't know, I'm just afraid that if he gets away with beating up those people and driving them off, well, you might be able to avoid humiliation tomorrow, but by and by the storm will break when we least expect it, and there goes your reputation—what then?" When Chin-i didn't answer, Old Granny continued: "Young lady, at this point you're the only one who can rein Nomi in. If we don't move smartly we'll have an awful mess on our hands, and for you, young lady, an awful mess means a spectacular disgrace. Just now I was out to the servants' quarters and I can tell you that Nomi [End Page 156] had the bloodwrath look about him—worse than She-Who-Beat Her-Daughter-in-Law-to-Death. There he was with the head thug of Pujung...

"The Low Hum in Syllables and Meters": Blues Poetics in Bob Dylan's Verbal Art

It may seem to be stating the obvious when pointing to the fact that Bob Dylan’s songs carry the voices of master blues singers. Vocal texture and color, singing behind the beat, and the use of twelve-bar rhythms might very well prove sufficient indicators for qualifying Dylan as a blues musician. Unfortunately, however, the elaborate and fascinating details of blues verbal artistry continue to remain a mystery to many scholars, as well as many musicians themselves. In this paper, we will take a closer look at the poetics of traditional blues lyrics within the particular context of their strong influence on Dylan’s songwriting. In doing so, we will focus on language use. Our goal is a deeper understanding of tradition, transmission, and personal creativity. By poetics, I mean that function of language that serves to enhance, embellish, and in any way focus the attention of listeners (or readers) on what could be called the “message for the sake of the message.” This definition is a direct borrowing from Roman Jakobson’s description (1987:62-94) of the interworkings of poetics in all speech genres, from everyday forms to the most complex and calculated of written poetries. Ethnopoetics, 1 which has been used most widely to treat Native American oral traditions, have contributed to the knowledge that poetic structures, motifs, and devices are culture-specific. Versification, narrative technique, sound patterns, metaphors, symbolic matrices, imagery, characterization, grammar use and all other such techniques derive from cultural uses of the

Made You Listen

This experiment tested an intuitive principle in the radio industry: that production effects (i.e., laser sounds, voice modulation, etc.) increase listener attention to messages. Professional voice talent created 5-10 second promotional announcements (promos) for nine fictitious stations. Each contained a slogan considered typical of industry practices (“Channel 97 WRRK—The Classic Rock Station”). Three of the promos were produced as announcer only, three with laser effects, and three with an echo effect. The promos systematically alternated between 2-minute segments of talk show content to resemble typical broadcast programming. Heart rate data were collected, time locked to the media presentation, from 62 participants as they listened to the stimulus. Afterwards, recognition data were collected. Results show cardiac deceleration following production effects, indicative of automatic allocation of attention. Memory data show an expected increase in recognition for information in the promos containing production effects, although not all memory tests reach statistical significance.

Auditory attention: One term for several concepts?

The recent rise in the use of spectrally and temporally complex stimuli appears to be responsible for the increasingly frequent use of the term attention as an explanation of results in auditory experiments. It seems timely, therefore, to provide a broad examination of the various meanings often associated with this term. The goal of this session is to explore the ways in which the concept of auditory attention has been applied and perhaps suggest ways in which its application could be refined. An essential first question then is whether auditory attention refers to one concept or many. This talk will begin by examining the historical uses of this term and then proceed to outline some of the contemporary uses of the term, relating them back to the theoretical concepts the term is meant to represent. A specific example will be provided by reviewing a recent series of experiments in which the experimental designs were intended to manipulate listener attention and which were interpreted as providing insight into the mechanisms available for performing a variety of auditory tasks. [Work supported by NIH/NIDCD.]

Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (review)

Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. By Mark Katz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. [xiii, 276 p. ISBN 0520243803. $19.95.] Index, notes, compact disc. It is a curious fact that the enormous changes in musical culture precipitated by sound recording began to attract the attention of scholars only after many decades. This was due not simply to scholars' focal interest in of earlier centuries and of non-Western societies, but to a fundamental misconception of the medium. Viewed widely as a mode of representation rather than a commingling of medium and content, each affecting the other, sound recording was relegated conceptually to a primarily functional status, a tool for documentation and dissemination. Such a conception was supported historically by advances in recording that aimed at ever greater transparency. High-fidelity recording sought to render the medium silent, directing the listener's full attention to the recording's content. But the attempt to remove sonic distraction was itself a distraction. For no matter how skillfully the illusion of transparency was propagated, sound recording's on musical life was indelible practically from the beginning. Over the past fifteen years, interest in sound recording has fostered a rising tide of historical and critical commentary well symbolized by the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (located at the University of London), an organization devoted to musicological projects focused on sound recording. Both riding this tide and pushing it further, Mark Katz's Capturing Sound is an eclectic exploration of the effect (p. 3), the multidimensional influence of mediated sound on musical life. The book owes something to Evan Eisenberg's Recording Angel (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987) in its broad scope and entertaining array of anecdotes. Capturing Sound, however, is both more specific musically and less involved with philosophical musing. Katz writes in a straightforward way accessible to all lovers, yet his writing is founded on solid scholarly evidence. Further user-friendliness is provided by an accompanying compact disc containing many examples illustrating issues discussed in the book. Katz opens his argument with a list and description of distinctive and defining trait [s] of sound recording technology that account for effects: tangibility, portability, invisibility, repeatability, temporality, and manipulability (p. 9 ff.). Each of these traits influences sound production and perception in fundamental ways that distinguish recording from live performance, a distinction that identifies the source of all phonograph effects. As such, one of the book's narrative threads is the historical and conceptual interface between recording and performance, the ways in which their differences and their interactions shape musical practice and reception. As Katz summarizes: every manifestation of recording's influence, whether the act of solitary listening, the length of certain jazz works, or the flare scratch (and turntablism in general, for that matter), may be traced to the traits of recording that distinguish it from live music-making (p. 189). Having defined a set of practical and conceptual reference points, Katz examines widely divergent evidence of phonograph effects scattered across continents and historical time. Each of seven chapters explores a set of issues raised by a particular manifestation of the music/technology interface. We learn of the pedagogical hopes for the phonograph in early twentieth-century America, where many promoted the machine's promise to bring good music (i.e., classical music) to a broad public (chapter 2). Next, Katz takes up recording's influence on the development of jazz, as well as the historiographie value of jazz recordings (chapter 3). Moving to classical performance practice, Katz presents a detailed study of changes in violin vibrato over the first half of the twentieth century attributable, he argues, to the exigencies of recording, notably the trait of invisibility (chapter 4). …

Visual arguments

Three experiments investigated the use of verb argument structure by tracking participants' eye movements across a set of related pictures as they listened to sentences. The assumption was that listeners would naturally look at relevant pictures as they were mentioned or implied. The primary hypothesis was that a verb would implicitly introduce relevant entities (linguistic arguments) that had not yet been mentioned, and thus a picture corresponding to such an entity would draw anticipatory looks. For example, upon hearing … mother suggested…, participants would look at a potential recipient of the suggestion. The only explicit task was responding to comprehension questions. Experiments 1 and 2 manipulated both the argument structure of the verb and the typicality/co-occurrence frequency of the target argument/adjunct, in order to distinguish between anticipatory looks to arguments specifically and anticipatory looks to pictures that were strongly associated with the verb, but did not have the linguistic status of argument. Experiment 3 manipulated argument status alone. In Experiments 1 and 3, there were more anticipatory looks to potential arguments than to potential adjuncts, beginning about 500 ms after the acoustic onset of the verb. Experiment 2 revealed a main effect of typicality. These findings indicate that both real world knowledge and argument structure guide visual attention within this paradigm, but that argument structure has a privileged status in focusing listener attention on relevant aspects of a visual scene.

Morphopragmatic phenomena in Hungarian

Morphopragmatics is defined as the relationship between morphology and pragmatics, in other words, it investigates pragmatic aspects of patterns created by morphological rules. The paper discusses three morphopragmatic phenomena in Hungarian. The first one concerns the use of the excessive which does not add semantic information to the superlative and carries purely pragmatic information. It is used to express the highest possible degree of some property and it carries the conversational implicature that the speaker wants to draw the listener's attention to the importance of what he is saying. The second problem discussed has to do with the pragmatics of the diminutive suffix. The semantic meaning of the diminutive suffix is `small' or `a little' (the latter occurs with mass nouns), which, however, is often overridden by the pragmatic meaning. In most cases, the use of the diminutive signals a positive emotional attitude, but it may carry a pejorative meaning, too. Finally, the third phenomenon concerns t...

Silence, Echo: A Response to "What the Sorcerer Said"

In "What the Sorcerer Said," Carolyn Abbate proposed a reading of Dukas's Sorcerer's Apprentice (1897) focused on the possibility of musical narration. The present essay shifts that focus to the question of the work's uncanniness and excess. In particular, where Abbate finds that the slow part of the epilogue resonates with her understanding of the work as an instance of narration, I begin with the final two measures of the work, which suddenly revert to the fast tempo of the central scherzo. These final measures, which Abbate does not mention, produce a disturbing regression that suggests another reanimation of the broom. This "third beginning" (thus heard in relation to the two preceding moments of animation) marks the broom as an agent of the uncanny (heimlich and unheimlich) in the sense identified by Freud in his essay "Das Unheimliche" (1919). Indeed, Dukas's work as a whole is haunted by motives Freud later identified as uncanny: magic, the omnipotence of thought, animism, and involuntary repetition. The essay works backward from the final noise of the piece into a re-reading founded on musical details such as the representation of the brooms through minor- and major-third dyads, the role of the pitch-class Ab, the structure of the central "reanimation scene," and the dismal interplay of motives associated with the broom and the Apprentice. Close attention is given to Dukas's immediate literary source, Goethe's ballad "Der Zauberlehrling," whose use of assonance and repeating rhymes provides subtle structural cues echoed in Dukas's music; I argue that the relationship between the ballad and Dukas's score is more homologous than Abbate was willing to allow. A number of revisions to Abbate's account also emerge through reference to a descriptive note on The Sorcerer's Apprentice left by Dukas in manuscript (Paris B.N.F. Musique MS 1037). Finally, I suggest that this "symphonic scherzo after Goethe" conflates literary and musical logics into a peculiar kind of fiction that points to the uncanny nature of narrative itself. Dukas's work ultimately engages the issue of mastery by focusing the listener's attention on the failure of authority and the contingency of animation or de-animation. In this Lacanian "overflow" into the unknown, the musical work goes beyond its literary sources, for the broom, not the human figure of the Apprentice, becomes the true protagonist of Dukas's work.

Pitch perception and retention: two cumulative benefits of selective attention.

By presenting, before a "chord" of three pure tones with remote frequencies, a tone relatively close in frequency to one component (T1) of the chord, one can direct the listener's attention onto T1 within the chord. In the first part of the present study, it was found that this increases the accuracy with which the pitch of T1 is perceived. The attentional cue improved the discrimination between the frequency of T1 and that of another tone (T2) presented immediately after the chord or very shortly (300 msec) after it. No improvement was found when T1 was presented alone instead of within a chord. A subsequent experiment, in which the chord and T2 were separated by either 300 msec or 4 sec, indicated that the attentional cue improved not only the perception, but also the memorization of the pitch of T1 (especially when T1 was the intermediate component of the chord). It is argued that the positive effect of attention on memory took place when the pitch percept was encoded into memory, rather than after the formation of the pitch memory trace.

Acoustic and behavioral analyses of gecker distress vocalizations in young rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta)

Loud, pulsed gecker calls have long been known as one of the most common distress vocalizations produced by young rhesus macaques, but have not been systematically investigated. We therefore examined the rates, acoustics, and behavioral contexts associated with geckering, based on audio-recording and focal-animal observations conducted over 4 years at the California National Primate Research Center. The sample analyzed came from 14 young rhesus macaques, with 74 recorded gecker bouts and 556 total pulses. Callers ranged from 1 to 41 months, who in their first year showed most geckering in months 0–2 (26%) and 2–4 (35%). Females geckered longer and at higher rates than males, as well as showing acoustic differences likely to reflect greater vocal effort (e.g., more doubled and tripled pulses, greater noisiness, and higher first frequency peaks). Geckers were associated with 22 differentiable behavioral contexts, typically occurring when with the mother but without obvious antecedents (31.1%), and when the mother broke physical contact with the youngster (13.5%). The most frequent postcedent context of geckering was that most offspring gained the mother’s attention and/or renewed proximity (49%). In combination, the outcomes suggest that geckers primarily function to draw listener attention, and are used by youngsters to elicit maternal response.

The creation and projection of ambiophonic and geometrical sonic spaces with reference to Denis Smalley's Base Metals

This article suggests a framework for the articulation of ambiophonic and geometrical spaces in electroacoustic composition and performance. Space-ambiophony explores the global perception of space, which is derived from the archetypal perception of surrounding environments. The term applies to usually large-scale observation but it can also include shifts in the listener's attention from gestalt perception to micro-structural observation. A spatial analysis of Smalley's Base Metals demonstrates the methods by which space-ambiophony is integrated into the composition. In space-geometry, relations and analogies are established between composed sonic events and principles of geometry and stereometry. Three primordial geometrical elements, drawn from Wassily Kandinsky's theoretical work on painting, serve as metaphorical cells for the construction and projection of this type of space: the point, the line and the plane.The interaction between the acoustic qualities of listening spaces, the configuration of loudspeakers, the composed space (sonic trajectories, background, foreground) and its projection by the interpreter in a concert, are all issues that occupy parts of the article.

An Adaptive Interface System Based on a Speech Meaning Acquisition Model

The purpose of this study is to propose a speech meaning acquisition model, which can be applied for an adaptive interface system, from a perspective of human-human communication establishment process. The model was designed to discriminate the types of instructions based on salient prosodic features and to recognize the given instructions using a positive reward (given for its successful action) and a negative reward (from the utterance of a instructor which draws listener's attention). As a result of a test, this model could eventually learn to recognize the given instruction from an actual human instructor. It is expected that the constructed meaning acquisition model can be applied for an adaptive interface system, which provides a natural interaction environment for its user.

Electrophysiologic Correlates of Attention versus Distraction in Young and Elderly Listeners

This study examined the effects of selective attention versus stimulus competition on the late auditory evoked potential (LAEP) in 20 young and 20 elderly listeners. In a series of test runs, different oddball tonal sequences were presented to one or both ears, and listeners were instructed to attend to tones at a specific target ear. Peak amplitudes were recorded for the N1, P2, and the early and late N2 components of the LAEP. Significant attention effects were found for all four components. N1 amplitudes increased significantly when participants attended to the target stimuli, whereas the amplitudes of P2, N2e, and N21 decreased. For all LAEP components except N21, the attention effect did not differ between young and elderly listeners. Significant competition effects also were found for all four components. Amplitudes were significantly larger in monaural than binaural conditions for all components except N21. The magnitude of this competition effect also was significantly larger for the young listeners than the elderly for all components except N1. These results suggest that the ability to attend selectively to sounds may be more resistant to normal aging than are effects related to stimulus competition.

“Token Codeswitching” and language alternation in narrative discourse: A Functional-Pragmatic approach

This study is concerned with two phenomena of language alternation in biographic narrations in Yiddish and Low German, based on spoken language data recorded between 1988 and 1995. In both phenomena language alternation serves as an additional communicative tool which can be applied by bilingual speakers to enlarge their set of interactional devices in order to ensure a smoother or more pointed processing of communicative aims. The first phenomenon is a narrative strategy that I call Token Codeswitching: In a bilingual narrative culminating in a line of reported speech, a single element of L2 indicates the original language of the reconstructed dialogue—a token for a quote. The second phenomenon has to do with directing procedures, carried out by the speaker and aimed at guiding the hearer's attention, which are frequently carried out in L2, supporting the hearer's attention at crucial points in the interaction. Both phenomena are analyzed following a model of narrative discourse as proposed in the framework of Functional Pragmatics. The model allows the adoption of an integral approach to previous findings in codeswitching research.

Effects of age and divided attention on listeners' comprehension of synthesized speech

Research has demonstrated that synthesized speech can be adequately understood under ideal conditions, although listeners' comprehension of synthesized speech has received less attention than has intelligibility. However, little is known about the comprehensibility of synthesized speech under less than ideal conditions, such as when the listener's attention is divided. Further, little is known about older adults' ability to comprehend synthesized speech. This study investigated younger and older listeners' comprehension of synthesized discourse under focused attention and divided attention conditions. Results demonstrated that synthesized discourse can be adequately comprehended by young and older adults in a focused attention condition. However, when attention is divided, listeners were able to comprehend significantly less of the synthesized discourse than the natural discourse. This effect was greater for older adult listeners.

Effects of age and divided attention on listeners' comprehension of synthesized speech

Research has demonstrated that synthesized speech can be adequately understood under ideal conditions, although listeners' comprehension of synthesized speech has received less attention than has intelligibility. However, little is known about the comprehensibility of synthesized speech under less than ideal conditions, such as when the listener's attention is divided. Further, little is known about older adults' ability to comprehend synthesized speech. This study investigated younger and older listeners' comprehension of synthesized discourse under focused attention and divided attention conditions. Results demonstrated that synthesized discourse can be adequately comprehended by young and older adults in a focused attention condition. However, when attention is divided, listeners were able to comprehend significantly less of the synthesized discourse than the natural discourse. This effect was greater for older adult listeners.

Language Use in Computer-Mediated Communication: The Role of Coordination Devices

In text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC), people's language use and task performance can be affected by whether explicit coordination devices (e.g., a turn marker) are available. Analyses of 37 dialogues that emerged in text-based, CMC environments support Clark's (1996, 1997) proposal that a communication setting that disrupts the regulation of turn-taking will both undermine higher level language processes (i.e., the construal of meaning) and increase the frequency of metacommunicative signals required to coordinate the speaker's action with the listener's attention. The results indicate that the availability of a simple, explicit turn marker in a task-oriented, text-based exchange facilitates the construal of meaning and reduces the number of verbal coordination devices required to ground communication. Measures examining alternative interpretations indicate that these effects are not easily explained by differences in volubility or speed-accuracy trade-off across the 2 conditions.

Pointing and talk by low-income mothers and their 14-month-old children

This study examines maternal talk and uses of the pointing gesture during interaction with young children in order to uncover the relationship between maternal and child pointing and talk. Forty- five low-income mother-child dyads were videotaped in their homes at child age 14 months. Results indicate that: (a) mothers and children who talk more point more during interaction, (b) the majority of pointing gestures are used to direct the hearer's attention, (c) mothers who communicate more with their children view their children as understanding more, (d) more educated mothers point more in the context of discussing a joint focus of attention and for conversation-directing purposes. Findings are discussed in terms of the relationship between maternal communi cative characteristics and child pointing and talk.

'This Machine Is Obsolete'

'This Machine Is Obsolete'