Hearer's Perspective Research Articles

Hearing Voices Sessions in Providing Peer Support: A First-Person Account and Voice Hearer's Perspective.

Hearing Voices Sessions in Providing Peer Support: A First-Person Account and Voice Hearer's Perspective.

An Interlanguage Study of Request Perspective: Evidence from German, Greek, Polish and Russian Learners of English

Abstract The present study examines request perspective, the least researched form of mitigation in requesting, while focusing on a type of request characterized by a strong preference for speaker perspective in English and for hearer perspective in most other languages researched to date. It examines requests produced by 900 speakers from nine different (inter)language groups: five groups of native speakers (English, German, Greek, Polish and Russian) and four groups of advanced learners of English as a foreign language (German, Greek, Polish and Russian L1s). While our learners used more conventionally indirect forms than did the native speakers of the respective L1s, showing awareness of this English pragmatic norm, they retained a preference for the hearer perspective. These results suggest reliance on pragmatic universals as an alternative explanation to pragmatic transfer, also illustrating the need to address less salient pragmatic features in English language teaching.

Interpreting uncertainty terms.

Uncertainty terms (e.g., some, possible, good, etc.) are words that do not have a fixed referent and hence are relatively ambiguous. A model is proposed that specifies how, from the hearer's perspective, recognition of facework as a potential motive for the use of an uncertainty term results in a calibration of the intended meaning of that term. Four experiments are reported that examine the impact of face threat, and the variables that affect it (e.g., power), on the manner in which a variety of uncertainty terms (probability terms, quantifiers, frequency terms, etc.) are interpreted. Overall, the results demonstrate that increased face threat in a situation will result in a more negative interpretation of an utterance containing an uncertainty term. That the interpretation of so many different types of uncertainty terms is affected in the same way suggests the operation of a fundamental principle of language use, one with important implications for the communication of risk, subjective experience, and so on.

The Interplay Between the Speaker’s and the Hearer’s Perspective

The neutralization of contrasts in form or meaning that is sometimes observed in language production and comprehension is at odds with the classical view that language is a systematic one-to-one pairing of forms and meanings. This special issue is concerned with patterns of forms and meanings in language. The papers in this special issue arose from a series of workshops that were organized to explore variants of bidirectional Optimality Theory and Game Theory as models of the interplay between the speaker's and the hearer's perspective.

Discourse marking and the subtle art of mind-reading: The case of Dutch eigenlijk

This article gives a unified semantic analysis of the various uses of the Dutch discourse marker eigenlijk. Eigenlijk is analyzed as involving implicit assumptions of the speaker about the hearer's expectations: by using eigenlijk, the speaker marks the plausibility of what s/he assumes the hearer to infer on the basis of their shared beliefs. Hence, the speaker not only recognizes the discrepancy between the speaker's and the hearer's perspective, but in addition, the speaker puts him/herself in the hearer's shoes. The claims are empirically supported by the results of a web experiment as well as by data from natural language.

Noisy zones of proximal development: Conversation in noisy classrooms

Despite the importance of context in studies of language use, sociolinguists have ignored the impact of noise on conversational interaction. This inattention is of particular concern in classrooms where language is a learning tool. Our research on interaction in noisy settings took place in English language elementary school classrooms with students in grades 3, 5, and 7, whose first language was English. Students were observed during regular classroom activities. Employing a novel method, in which students wore ear‐level microphones, we obtained stereophonic recordings of the noise and conversation that reached each listener's ears. A dosimeter measured the noise levels in each classroom. Analyses of students’ patterns of conversation suggest that noise levels impeded the intended development of complex conversational interaction and collaborative learning. This study also questions the place of acoustics in understanding context, and the significance of the hearer's perspective in sociolinguistic studies of conversational interactions.

Constructing a context with intonation

It is widely accepted that intonation makes a significant and systematic contribution to utterance interpretation. Less well understood are the linguistic or paralinguistic mechanisms by which the meaningful effects we identify and describe are communicated. Recent work by Gussenhoven (2002) illuminates how these functions may be reconciled by appealing to partly grammaticalised ‘biological codes’. An explanatory pragmatic framework for analysing intonational meaning from the hearer's perspective may be found in Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995), which allows linguistic expressions to be coded for either conceptual or procedural meaning (Blakemore, 2002). This paper investigates what procedural coding, typically involving constraints on inferential processes, might look like when applied to intonation. Discussion centres on the structure-building properties of intonation together with an examination of the range of functions associated with one particular tonal pattern, the high rising tone (HRT).

Spence, S., & David, A. (Eds.). (2004). Voices in the brain: The cognitive neuropsychiatry of auditory verbal hallucinations. By Sukhi S. Shergill

S.A. Spence - Voices in the Brain. G. Cockshutt - Choices for Voices: A Voice Hearer's Perspective on Hearing Voices. P. Bracken, I. Leudar, P. Thomas - Hearing Voices: A Phenomenological-Hermeneutic Approach. T. Wykes - Psychological Treatment for Voices in Psychosis. M.L. Seal, A. Aleman, P.K. McGuire - Compelling Imagery, Unanticipated Speech and Deceptive Memory: Neurocognitive Models of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations in Schizophrenia. P.W.R. Woodruff - Auditory Hallucinations: Insights and Questions from Neuroimaging. M.D. Hunter, Locating Voices in Space: A Perceptual Model for Auditory Hallucinations? A.S. David - The Cognitive Neuropsychiatry of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations: An Overview. T.J. Crow - Auditory Hallucinations as Primary Disorders of Syntax: An Evolutionary Theory of the Origins of Language.

Choices for voices: A voice hearer's perspective on hearing voices

(2004). Choices for voices: A voice hearer's perspective on hearing voices. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry: Vol. 9, No. 1-2, pp. 9-11.

Types of emotional disclosures and request compliance between spouses

The present study investigated variations in emotional disclosures when making requests of one's spouse. Unpleasant emotions are often thought of as “taboos,”; but this study demonstrated that, from the hearer's perspective, all unpleasant emotions are not equally negative. In fact, in comparison to messages that were devoid of emotions and other types of unpleasant emotions, disclosing vulnerabilities and hostilities toward persons other than the hearer often prompted hearers to respond with more positive messages and to report a more positive attitude toward request compliance, one's relationship with the requester, and oneself. Respondents, however, did not report any difference in the likelihood with which they would comply with requests on the basis of variations in emotional disclosures. The hypotheses and the results are discussed in terms of the face‐needs of communicators.