Person Speaking Research Articles

Louis-René des Forêts and the Myth of the Lost Child

Louis-René des Forêts and the Myth of the Lost Child John T. Naughton I N LOUIS-RENÉ DES FORÊTS’S FIRST NOVEL, Les Mendiants, published in 1943, one of the characters, a steely and disillusioned woman named Annabelle, observes that “ la seule part de vous que vous considérez comme vraiment importante demeure cachée aux regards des hommes et tout ce que vous pouvez montrer d’autre est sans importance: des grimaces, des rôles. . . . ” 1Annabelle is seeking to high­ light the tension between the world of daily human intercourse which operates on an irreversibly superficial level and another, more deeply inward and secret world, which is the essence of individual destiny. The reality of this inner world is forever transmuted or eclipsed by role play­ ing and dissimulation, which are fostered by habitual modes of dis­ course. All of des Forêts’s work is, in fact, concerned with the desire to transmit something of the nature of this hidden reality and with the con­ viction that this “ part secrète” is inevitably distorted by the nature of the very forces deployed to represent it. In an interview he gave to Tel Quel in 1962, des Forêts remarked that “ écrire, cela suppose une exigence rigoureuse et exclusive, un movement vers une vérité toujours plus impérieuse, mais toujours plus fuyante, et qui s’affirme comme si essen­ tielle qu’on ne peut s’en écarter sans la certitude de gravement faillir.” And yet, he continues, “ ce que nous cherchons à atteindre se trouve tou­ jours détourné et modifié par l’acte médiateur qu’il nous faut accomplir pour l’atteindre.” 2 In Les Mendiants, des Forêts routinely sabotages the conventions of the traditional novel, especially through repetition and exaggeration. The “ characters,” in particular, are always on the verge of discarding the roles they precariously play, but without which they seem to have no being. The book, in fact, may be read as the death throes of the tradi­ tional character, and Le Bavard, published three years later, challenges all the rhetorical strategies that have contributed to the idea of character, the writer himself being seen as the supreme expression of this myth. The narrator of Le Bavard systematically unveils the uncriticized pretenses that are inherent in discourse. Writing is the means by which the funda­ mental and universal banality of experience is transformed and embelVOL . XXXII, NO. 2 19 L ’E s pr it C réa te u r lished. The person who addresses us seeks, above all, to seduce, impress, and dominate. Writing is thus invariably a form of intoxication and exhibitionism that exists as a function of erotic desire or the need to con­ trol and manipulate. It abolishes the existence of others in order to make them images of the subjective state of the person speaking. Although the narrator of Le Bavard makes every effort to convince his listener that there is no reason to believe a word of what he is saying, his discourse nonetheless contains a “ version” of what des Forêts will return to again and again as the essence of his own deepest apprehen­ sions. And it is this passage that is the least interrupted by self-consciousness and auto-criticism. After having been rebuffed in a noisy bar by a woman he has tried to seduce, the narrator wanders through snowy streets toward a public park where he is brutally beaten by the lover of the woman he has sought to woo. In his utterly reduced state of exhaus­ tion and pain, the narrator is all at once moved by the sounds of a chil­ dren’s choir which float through the icy air and into the park from a nearby church and seem to annul all sense of suffering and humiliation. The music fills the narrator with lightness, freedom, and joy. It seems to speak of a distant realm, at once sexless and sensual, existing far from human worries and concerns, far from the familiar odor of sin. “Avec le recul du temps,” the narrator observes, “ il me semble que ces voix exprimaient encore une totale indifférence aux douleurs humaines...

A Perspective about a Longitudinal Study of Clossroom Work : A Close Inquiry of Child's Speaking by Personal Speaking Diagram

A Perspective about a Longitudinal Study of Clossroom Work : A Close Inquiry of Child's Speaking by Personal Speaking Diagram

Infant sensitivity to audiovisually coherent events.

We examined 5-month-old infants' sensitivity to audiovisually coherent and incoherent events. A person speaking and an automobile with engine running were filmed approaching and receding with corresponding (coherent) soundtracks. Infants were tested with a habituation paradigm in which they observed coherent or incoherent films, involving, respectively, acoustical radial motion in the direction seen or opposite to the direction seen. Infants habituated to both person and car films, but coherent events uniformly yielded more rapid habituation than did incoherent ones. In addition, infants treated silent events more like audiovisual coherence than like incoherence. Infants habituated more to cars than to people, suggesting that a speaking person may especially maintain infant attention.

Overview of telephone interpretation research at ATR

The Automatic Telephone Interpretation system is a facility that enables a person speaking in one language to communicate readily by telephone with someone speaking another. Basic research on the component technologies, speech recognition, machine translation, and speech synthesis is being carried out at ATR. In speech recognition research, the goal is to recognize continuous speech containing a large vocabulary of approximately 3000 words. Based on phonemes as the subunit of speech, words and phrases are recognized. The main approach is a hybrid combination of feature‐based segmentation and phoneme and word recognition by hidden Markov and neural network models. A large‐scale speech database with phonetic transcriptions has been developed for use in speech research. The incorporation of speaker adaptation has been chosen as our approach to speaker independence. Recognition of conversational speech on a specific domain will be explored. Integrating speech and language processing is an important area to be tackled. A technology that uses information about languages and background knowledge to understand the speech content is being studied. As for speech synthesis, rule‐based speech synthesis with high quality and high naturalness is under development. In the area of machine translation, several approaches to the translation of spoken dialogue between Japanese and English are under study. Intention extraction for dialogue interpretation, a plan recognition model for intersentential analysis, and knowledge processing in a specific domain are intended to be investigated.

Voice modification system

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Group AVTA: A microcomputer system for group voice chronography

An Apple II microcomputer and electronic interface extends the automatic vocal transaction analyzer (AVTA) approach from dyads to groups, examining the on-off patterns of vocalization among up to eight persons at once. The system eliminates spurious cross talk among microphones, recognizes one person speaking alone, and recognizes several persons speaking at once. Data are included to show how well the system performs with a group of five. On-off patterns of vocalization can be used to investigate differences among groups or among individuals within a group (e.g., in status, dominance, or leadership).

The role of pre‐speech posture change in dyadic interaction

Eight dyadic interactions were videotaped in order to examine the possible relationship between changes in body posture and verbal behaviour. It was predicted that, prior to a person speaking, he or she would make a characteristic movement, moving perhaps the head or some other part of the body; the movement being specific to the type of speech it preceeded (e.g. question, answer, etc.). The hypothesis was supported. Raising and turning the head to the listener were associated with asking a question and turning the head away from the listener with giving an answer. It is suggested that changes in head posture associated with questions and answers (which ‘oner’ and ‘accept’ the floor respectively) are components of the floor apportionment mechanism.

Over Humane en A-Humane Taal.

I want to distinguish between two fundamental modes of being. The primary mode is typified by activities that are absolutely unique and at the same time absolutely universal, such as being born, living, growing up, eating, working, playing, loving, dying. These activities originate from my undivided being. The secondary mode is typified by activities that are socially and culturally determined. I perform these as a person (personamask). When I act as an individual I cannot be replaced by someone else; it is impos-sible to measure these activities (they have no 'market-value') and I don't learn them in the literal sense - all this in contradistinction to my social or role-activities. Accordingly I want to distinguish between human and a-human language (the terms have no ethical implications), or between the I-mode and the YOU-mode and between two resulting ways of speaking. I can speak as an individual and as a person and these ways of speaking are typified in compliance with the above-mentioned characteristics. Human language is perhaps a somewhat neglected phenomenon in linguistics. An allied phenomenon is the tendency in our culture to transfer individual speaking to the domain of speaking as a person. When I mark off these distinctions against certain dimensions in socio-pragmalinguistics I find that orientation on the illocutionary effect plays a prominent part in personal speaking. Splitting up myself into speaker and hearer I project myself into the hearer, planning my formulations from his point of view to make myself understood. When I speak as an individual I am not primarily focused on communication and the illocutionary effect. Making myself understood to an actual or potential hearer is subordinate to the adequate expression of what lies on my mind. Moreover, when I speak as a person I am often focused on the perlocutionary effect, that I can try to act upon by means of conditional relevance and selection of the correct code. The options I have between formal varieties are in fact to be explained in terms of the directive function of language. When I speak as an individual the idea of communicative interaction recedes into the background and the issue of the perlocutionary effect is left out. Concerning the substance of my speaking I have at my disposal a register of words, expressions, syntactic constructions and last but not least para-linguistic means that correspond with this expressive function of language. Probably personal speaking has a set of distinctions that are character-ized in terms of different distances from individual speaking. When the relation between individual and personal speaking goes astray, the distancing from my individual 'I1 can turn into alienation from myself.

Estimate of speaking rate

A technique is described for estimating a person's speaking rate from a short utterance. Four speakers read aloud four stories and also a randomized list of the sentences from those stories. An average time per phoneme was calculated for each sentence from the ratio of total speech time (excluding pauses) to the number of phonemes in the sentence. The longest average duration in these data is 66.4 msec per phoneme; the shortest, 59.6 msec per phoneme. Variation in average duration decreases as sentence duration increases. The story version shows a less variable distribution than the list version. In the story version, all sentences longer than 5 sec have average phoneme durations that fall within ±5 msec of the speaker's overall mean phoneme duration, whereas the list version requires sentences 7 sec long to reach this stability.

Listeners' Impressions of Speakers with Lateral Lisps

This paper reports research conducted to determine whether the lateral lisp is a speech defect. The specific purpose of this research was to determine whether the lateral lisp calls adverse attention to the speaker. Two groups of broadcast communication students rates the concept "The Person Speaking" on a 49-scale semantic differential. One group performed the task after listening to a tape recording of a young woman reading contextual material with a simulated lateral lisp. The other group performed the task after listening to a recording of the same woman reading the material in a normal manner. Analyses of the scale values computed for the two conditions indicated that the lateral lisp called adverse attention to the speaker. A systematic replication was undertaken to assess the generality of this finding. The procedures of the original investigation were followed except that business administration students served as judges. The results replicated those of the original investigation. These data indicate that the lateral lisp is probably a speech defect and suggest that the practice of eliminating school speech services for children whose only speech difference is a lateral lisp should be reconsidered.

The Suprasentential and the Unstructured Interview

Suprasentential refers to an apparently extraneous vocal phenomenon such as “oh,” “ah,” “well,” “you know,” a mid-sentence speech hesitation or a seemingly unconnected comment which, while not a necessary part of a sentence, contributes when present to vocal interaction. Suprasententials may serve to retain control of the speech-end of the dialogue, play a role in emotional expression, solicit a response from the person spoken to, or otherwise sustain conversation. A classification including nine kinds of suprasentential is suggested. A method for eliciting sustained speech via picture-story items and open-ended discussion items in a dyadic situation is described.

Can One Recognize Kinds of Private Objects?

In § 243 of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein characterizes a private language as follows: “The individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.” A private language is what each of us would need to talk of his own sensations if two philosophical theses were true: namely, (1) that only the person who has a sensation can know that he has it and what kind of sensation it is and (2) that since (1) is true, the names he applies to his own sensations can only be understood by him. If (1) and (2) were true, could a person classify and talk about his own sensations?

Voice and personality interrelationships

The discussion presented here is concerned with identifying the voice as a symptom in the analysis of personality, and demonstrating how vocal sounds may be an indicator of personality dominances characteristic of the person speaking.

Cocopa Baby Talk

1. Deviations from a normal or customary manner of speaking in order to convey information by means of the deviations themselves 'belong properly in the domain of abnormal types of speech'.2 These deviations employ such morphological processes as reduplication, consonantal and vocalic ablaut, affixation, and suppletion, as well as intonational, rhythmic, and other prosodic features. They are 'devices' which are employed for the purpose of communicating something about the 'status, sex, age, or other characteristics of the speaker, person addressed, or person spoken of, without any direct statement as to such characteristics'.3 Employment of prosody and the morphological process suppletion to accomplish this purpose is often treated under the rubric 'styles' of speech.4 Our techniques for transcription and analysis have been, and still are, more amenable to describing morphological processes than the various features of prosody. The use of processes in abnormal types of speech has attracted the interest of scholars, who have

A cineradiographic study of speech production.

The ability to speak is a distinctly human characteristic, and is probably the most complex sensory-motor activity in which man engages. The need to understand more about this process is urgent, and any technics which may shed light upon it should be investigated. In speaking, the sound produced at the level of the larynx is modified primarily by the structures in the oral region: the tongue, the velum palatinum, the alveolar ridge, and the teeth. To the person speaking, the senses of hearing and touch provide important information. These forms of feedback let the speaker know, through auditory and physiologic stimuli, how he is doing and enable him to regulate specific movements of the articulators. The relationship of the various oral structures to one another during the process of speech has been studied in a variety of ways. For example, one may look at the person speaking and make certain observations regarding these relationships. Obviously, there are limitations to this method. Or, through the use of palatograms, observations may be made in respect to the site at which the tongue makes contact with the palate in producing sounds. This technic, however, is a static one and does not yield information relative to the sequence of movements involved. Cinefluorographic studies have been made of normal speech production and afford an opportunity to view speech structures not normally amenable to visual inspection, and to view them in action. The exploratory study to be described here was designed to investigate the influence of reduced auditory and tactile feedback on compensatory articulatory movements. Because of the advantages of the cineradiographic technic, it was selected for this investigation. Method To test the role of some of the feedback mechanisms, we attempted to block their paths, individually and in combination. Eleven normal young adult males with no detectable speech abnormality or oral pathologic condition were used in an experiment with four selected phonemes. Each subject spoke the phonemes in isolated form and in combination with other phonemes to form words. Our phrases were: Th as in thoughts Ss as in sots T as in tots D as in dots As the subject recited these phrases, his tongue action was roentgenographed by a cineradiographic strip from a Philips 5-inch image amplifier, and his voice was simultaneously recorded on tape. During the tests a wooden tongue blade was inserted vertically between the jaws. Small notches were cut in the upper and lower margins, 25 mm. from the end, in which upper and lower central incisor teeth were placed during the test to immobilize the jaws and interfere with normal tongue action. The mechanical difficulty encountered by the subjects in speaking with this impediment caused them to engage in compensatory articulatory movements.

The Acoustics Design of the Large Council Chambers, Permanent Headquarters of the United Nations, New York

The design of large parliamentary chambers for conferences conducted in many languages presents a number of new acoustics design problems. Not only must the acoustic environment be “comfortable,” but it must be possible to hear clearly a person speaking in any part of the delegates area, either directly or as simultaneously translated into any of four or five languages. The design and isolation of the many booths for translators, radio, and press surrounding these rooms was the subject of much study. The general isolation of noise from surrounding service areas and outdoor sources, such as traffic on the East River and in the air, were also considered. Special attention was given to the coordination of the sound reinforcing system with the acoustic design of the chambers. Preliminary articulation tests have been conducted in these rooms and the results are presented.

The Vocoder—Electrical Re-Creation of Speech<!--<xref ref-type="other" rid="fn1-10.5594_J10096">*</xref>-->

In the Bell Telephone Laboratories have been developed electrical circuits for the artificial production of speech. One form of the device is itself voice-controlled, thus differing fundamentaly from the Voder of the World's Fair which is controlled by keys and pedals. It has been christened the “Vocoder” or “voice coder.” — Many startling effects are possible when the code is varied, for the Vocoder then recreates sounds quite different from those used by the person speaking. Cadences may become monotones, rising inflections may be turned to falling inflections, a vigorous voice may become a quaver, or a single voice may accompany itself at any desired musical interval—thus converting a solo into a duet, e:c. Also non-speech sounds may be coded into intelligible speech and instrumental music into vocal music.

Crossley's Modification of Hughes's Microphone

EVER since Hughes's discovery of those principles which led to his invention of the microphone, inventors have been trying to improve the instrument by adopting every variety of form and employing every combination of apparatus that were likely to lead to good results. The failures must have been legion, and of the successes the members of the British Association have had during their stay at Sheffield, an opportunity of examining and seeing at work perhaps the most efficient—Crossley's modification of the microphone. Six distant places—the two newspaper offices and four meeting-rooms—were telegraphically connected with the Cutlers' Hall, where a switch-board stood to place any two distant stations into communication, thus illustrating the exchange system so largely employed in America. Every one is aware that with the telephone the speaker has to hold the instrument to his mouth; With the Crossley's transmitter, however, conversation, a few feet away, is readily conveyed. The transmitter is now being largely employed in the United Kingdom, and it is found that where telephones alone are useless because of the induction of adjacent wires, the instrument acts admirably. The undulatory current produced by sonorous vibrations is so intense that a person speaking about a foot away from a transmitter has been heard ten feet from an ordinary telephone in Manchester thirty-six miles away by wire, and this although the induction from some thirty adjacent wires had to be overcome, and we may add that the intensity of the sound may be largely augmented by employing increased battery power.