Short Discourses Research Articles

Electrophysiological evidence for the enhancement of gesture-speech integration by linguistic predictability during multimodal discourse comprehension

In face-to-face discourse, listeners exploit cues in the input to generate predictions about upcoming words. Moreover, in addition to speech, speakers produce a multitude of visual signals, such as iconic gestures, which listeners readily integrate with incoming words. Previous studies have shown that processing of target words is facilitated when these are embedded in predictable compared to non-predictable discourses and when accompanied by iconic compared to meaningless gestures. In the present study, we investigated the interaction of both factors. We recorded electroencephalogram from 60 Dutch adults while they were watching videos of an actress producing short discourses. The stimuli consisted of an introductory and a target sentence; the latter contained a target noun. Depending on the preceding discourse, the target noun was either predictable or not. Each target noun was paired with an iconic gesture and a gesture that did not convey meaning. In both conditions, gesture presentation in the video was timed such that the gesture stroke slightly preceded the onset of the spoken target by 130 ms. Our ERP analyses revealed independent facilitatory effects for predictable discourses and iconic gestures. However, the interactive effect of both factors demonstrated that target processing (i.e., gesture-speech integration) was facilitated most when targets were part of predictable discourses and accompanied by an iconic gesture. Our results thus suggest a strong intertwinement of linguistic predictability and non-verbal gesture processing where listeners exploit predictive discourse cues to pre-activate verbal and non-verbal representations of upcoming target words.

Expectations about upcoming discourse referents

Abstract In the current study, we explore how different information-structural devices affect which referents conversational partners expect in the upcoming discourse. Our main research question is how pitch accents (H*, L+H*) and focus particles (German nur ‘only’ and auch ‘also’) affect speakers’ choices to mention focused referents, previously mentioned alternatives or new, inferable alternatives. Participants in our experiment were presented with short discourses involving two referents and were asked to orally produce two sentences that continue the story. An analysis of speakers’ continuations showed that participants were most likely to mention a contextual alternative in the condition with only and the L+H* conditions, followed by H* conditions. In the condition with also, in turn, participants mentioned both the focused/accented referent and the contextual alternative. Our findings highlight the importance of information structure for discourse management and suggest that speakers take activated alternatives to be relevant for an unfolding discourse.

Situational expectancy or association? The influence of event knowledge on the N400

ABSTRACT Electrophysiological studies suggest that situational event knowledge plays an important role in language processing, but often fail to distinguish whether observed effects are driven by combinatorial expectations, or simple association with the context. In two ERP experiments, participants read short discourses describing ongoing events. We manipulated the situational expectancy of the target word continuing the event as well as the presence of an associated, but inactive event in the context. In both experiments we find an N400 effect for unexpected compared to expected target words, but this effect is significantly attenuated when the unexpected target is nonetheless associated with non-occurring context events. Our findings demonstrate that the N400 is simultaneously influenced by both simple association with – and combinatorial expectations derived from – situational event knowledge. Thus, experimental investigations and comprehension models of the use of event knowledge must accommodate the role of both expectancy and association in electrophysiological measures.

한중일 의뢰행동에 나타나는 상호행위 양상 연구 : 대화개시부의 분석을 중심으로

The current study analyzes the aspects of inter actions taken by the requester and the requestee by observing Korean, Chinese, and Japanese college students who ask for a recommendation from their advising professors.BR The interactions expressed during the initial conversation are (1) greeting when entering the room, (2) request for self-introduction, (3) request to sit down, and (4) making the request.BR The current study makes the following observations about interactions of the Korean, Chinese, and Japanese students.BR (1) When the requester entered his or her advising professor’s office, Korean professors (requestees) only used response expressions without saying greeting expressions.BR (2) When requesting self-introduction to the requester, Japanese-speaking requestees utilized various levels of honorific speech.BR (3) When the requestee asked the requester to take a seat, Japanese- and Chinese-speaking requesters sat down as they used expressions of gratitude to the professor, but Korean-speaking requesters only said “yes.”BR (4) Korean-speaking requesters took the initiative in requesting the recommendation, while Chinese-speaking students indirectly approached the subject when their advising professor asked their purpose of visit. In addition, Japanese speakers tended to begin their request with expressions of apology.BR As shown, the current research reveals that Korean-, Chinese-, and Japanese-speaking requesters and requestees take different forms of interaction in short discourses made when beginning a conversation.

Gradient acoustic information induces long-lasting referential uncertainty in short discourses

ABSTRACTThree experiments examined the influence of gradient acoustic information on referential interpretation during spoken language processing and how this influence persists over time. Acoustic continua varying between the pronouns “he” and “she” were created and validated in two offline experiments. A third experiment examined whether these acoustic differences influence online pronoun interpretation, and whether this influence persists across words in a discourse. Measures of eye gaze showed immediate sensitivity to graded acoustic information. Moreover, acoustically induced uncertainty persisted across a five-word delay: When listeners encountered a word that disambiguated the referent of the pronoun differently than it had originally been interpreted, the amount of time they took to recover from an initial misinterpretation was directly related to distance along the acoustic continuum between the pronoun and the endpoint corresponding to the correct referent. These findings show that fine-grained acoustic detail induces referential uncertainty that is maintained over extended periods of time.

Lexical Ambiguity Resolution Using Discourse Contexts in Persons With and Without Aphasia.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the ability of persons with aphasia (PWA) to resolve different types of ambiguous words (homophones, metaphors, and metonyms) in discourse contexts. Six PWA and 10 controls listened to short discourses that biased either the dominant (more frequent) or subordinate (less frequent) version of an ambiguous word as well as nonsense (filler) discourses. Participants then indicated whether or not the final sentence, which contained the ambiguity, made sense in the discourse. Data for both accuracy and reaction time were collected. There was no significant Group × Word Type × Frequency interaction in the reaction time data. In the accuracy analysis, there was a significant Group × Frequency × Word Type interaction, which appeared to be driven by the PWA's relative accuracy with subordinate homophones and relative inaccuracy with subordinate metaphors. These results suggest that PWA were able to use discourse contexts to resolve subordinate versions of literal ambiguous words but have difficulty resolving metaphoric ambiguous words. Further investigations should be done to clarify how much context PWA require to successfully resolve lexical ambiguities.

How Distance Affects Semantic Integration in Discourse: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials.

Event-related potentials were used to investigate whether semantic integration in discourse is influenced by the number of intervening sentences between the endpoints of integration. Readers read discourses in which the last sentence contained a critical word that was either congruent or incongruent with the information introduced in the first sentence. Furthermore, for the short discourses, the first and last sentence were intervened by only one sentence while for the long discourses, they were intervened by three sentences. We found that the incongruent words elicited an N400 effect for both the short and long discourses. However, a P600 effect was only observed for the long discourses, but not for the short ones. These results suggest that although readers can successfully integrate upcoming words into the existing discourse representation, the effort required for this integration process is modulated by the number of intervening sentences. Thus, discourse distance as measured by the number of intervening sentences should be taken as an important factor for semantic integration in discourse.

Emphasizing the only character: Emphasis, attention and contrast

In conversations, pragmatic information such as emphasis is important for identifying the speaker’s/writer’s intention. The present research examines the cognitive processes involved in emphasis processing. Participants read short discourses that introduced one or two character(s), with the character being emphasized or non-emphasized in subsequent texts. Eye movements showed that: (1) early processing of the emphasized word was facilitated, which may have been due to increased attention allocation, whereas (2) late integration of the emphasized character was inhibited when the discourse involved only this character. These results indicate that it is necessary to include other characters as contrastive characters to facilitate the integration of an emphasized character, and support the existence of a relationship between Emphasis and Contrast computation. Taken together, our findings indicate that both attention allocation and contrast computation are involved in emphasis processing, and support the incremental nature of sentence processing and the importance of contrast in discourse comprehension.

An investigation of the three tone system in Tsuut’ina (Dene)

This study is part of the documentation and conservation of Tsuut’ina (formerly Sarcee, Sarsi; ISO 639-3: srs), a northern Dene (Athabascan) language by a collaboration of academic and community members. Tsuut’ina is a tone language. Contrary to Dene tonogenesis theory and unlike reports on all other Dene tone languages, Tsuut’ina is reported to have three tones, H, L, M. The tonal system in Dene family has been argued to arise from the loss of laryngealized sonorants in monosyllabic stem codas and incorporation of laryngealization into the nucleus of the stem, resulting in H and L tonal contrasts. The Dene languages additionally exhibit “tonal reversal”, a tendency for the Dene tone languages to show “reversed” tonal patterns that postdate the original tonogenesis. In this study we investigate the tonal distribution, realization patterns and tonal alignment in data collected from two fluent speakers reciting prepared wordlists and short discourses. Preliminary investigation indicates that, as reported, three tonal patterns emerge, M tone associated most often with a falling tone, with distinct distribution patterns arguably related to morphological factors. Furthermore M tone is more highly variable. We lay out distribution patterns and interactions with morphology and statistical analyses associated with the data.

Reduction of consonants and vowels in the course of discourse

There is a clear link between the discourse status of a word and the degree of reduction. For instance, Gregory [Dissertation (2002)] provided evidence that hearer knowledge affected reduction in production for discourse-old items. Lexical information, such as word frequency, also plays a crucial role in the degree of reduction [Fosler-Lussier and Morgan, Speech Commun. (1999)]. These previous studies either looked at short discourses or words isolated from context. Therefore, the current study investigates longer discourses, using the VIC Corpus [Pitt etal., Corpus (2007)]. The primary question is to what degree do repeated uses cause further reductions, and if the reductions are syllabically and segmentally uniform across a word. Many studies on reduction rely on the intuition that reductions occur when information load is light, such as when the word was repeated recently or has a high probability of occurrence, so the prediction is that unstressed syllables would show more reduction than stressed syllables, due to their lighter load of information. Likewise, as vowels vary more than consonants across dialects, the informational load of vowel quality may be less than that of consonant quality, so the prediction is that vowels would show greater reductions than consonants.

Differential prosodic encoding of topic and focus in sentence-initial position in Mandarin Chinese

This paper reports an experimental investigation of the prosodic encoding of topic and focus in Mandarin by examining disyllabic subject nouns elicited in four discourse contexts. These subject nouns also varied in terms of their tonal composition as well as the length of their embedding sentences. The central questions addressed are how prosodic effects of topic and focus differ from each other and how they interact with sentence length, downstep and newness to determine sentence-initial F 0 variation. Sixty short discourses were recorded with variable focus, topic level, newness, downstep, and sentence length conditions by six native speakers. The results of extensive acoustic analyses show that (1) the difference between topic and focus lies in that focus both raises on-focus F 0 and lowers post-focus F 0 while topic raises the F 0 register at the beginning of the sentence while allowing F 0 to drop gradually afterwards, (2) topic has higher pitch register in isolated and discourse-initial sentences than in non-initial sentences, (3) longer sentences have higher sentence-initial F 0 than shorter sentences, but the differences are small in magnitude and are independent of topic and focus, (4) the effect of downstep is independent of topic and focus, but is large in magnitude and accounts for a significant amount of the F 0 declination in a sentence, (5) newness has no F 0 manifestation independent of other factors, but a newly mentioned word is slightly longer than a previously mentioned word, and (6) the effects of topic, focus, downstep and sentence length are largely cumulative. We argue that these findings are harmonious with an articulatory-functional view of speech prosody represented by the Parallel Encoding and Target Approximation model (PENTA).

From 26 Short Discourses on Yoga

From 26 Short Discourses on Yoga

Effects of discourse structure on F0 in Japanese: Raising versus lowering

Previous studies on English and other languages have shown that discourse structure has an influence on the intonation of a string of sentences or phrases. With respect to fundamental frequency in particular, both discourse-initial raising of F0 and final lowering effects have been reported. The present study examines whether discourse structure also influences intonation in Japanese, and if so, to what extent initial raising and final lowering interact to cue structure. Hierarchically organized discourses were constructed in which the target sentence position was varied. These short discourses were recorded by native speakers of Tokyo Japanese, and the fundamental frequency contours of the target sentences in each position were compared. Results indicate that there is a robust raising effect on discourse-initial phrases, as reported for other languages. The degree of raising is determined by an interaction between distance from the start of the utterance and pitch range. In contrast, there is little effect of lowering on discourse-final phrases. The few phrases that did show an effect suggest that syntactic structure may interact with the lowering process.

Competing hypotheses concerning the articulation of stress in English.

Previous studies have suggested two different hypotheses concerning the articulation of stress contrasts in English. Examination of low vowels surrounded by labial consonants generally shows lower jaw in accented as opposed to unaccented syllables, a result originally interpreted as a lower and hence louder vowel [Edwards et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 89, 369–382 (1991)]. On the other hand, a study of nonlow back vowels in alveolar contexts showed higher and backer tongue body in accented syllables, suggesting a more peripheral vowel [de Jong, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 97, 491–504 (1995)]. This paper reexamines the two hypotheses by looking at both jaw and tongue for both phonemically low and high vowels. Five speakers of Australian English read 20 tokens of two short discourses which placed the name ‘‘Babber’’ or ‘‘Beaber’’ twice each in accented and deaccented positions. Jaw and tongue positions were recorded simultaneously using a magnetometer. On average, the jaw was lower in all accented syllables, although the difference was smaller for the high vowel. At the same time, the tongue body reached significantly higher positions in accented high vowels, and somewhat lower positions in accented low vowels. Thus the two hypotheses can be reconciled by their application to the two different articulators. or

Pronouns, Passives, and Discourse Coherence

Four experiments examined how pronominalization of entities in different grammatical roles interacts with sentence structure (active vs passive) to promote local coherence in discourse. These experiments were conducted to evaluate and extend the centering theory of local discourse structure. A central postulate of this approach is that every sentence in a locally coherent discourse realizes a single semantic entity (the backward-looking center) that provides a link to the preceding utterance, and that the backward-looking center must be realized as a pronoun for this coherence function to be served. Recent research using self-paced reading time has supported this postulate by showing that in certain circumstances sentences in short discourses are read more slowly when they use repeated names rather than pronouns. The current experiments show that this repeated-name penalty does not depend on the thematic role (semantic function) of an entity in a sentence. Rather, it occurs for the entity realized by the grammatical subject of a sentence, independent of thematic role, if that entity was also realized in the preceding sentence. If the entity realized by the grammatical subject is new to the discourse, then the repeated-name penalty occurs for the direct object of a sentence. This suggests that the backward-looking center is determined by a hierarchy of grammatical roles.

Time and the Nervous System

This small book by a distinguished British neurologist is an outcome of his years of reflection on disorders of human cortical function, and on an insight that came to him one day with such force and suddenness that he recalls precise circumstances—driving his car near Alton in Hampshire on March 18, 1959. The insight was that the brain is place or mechanism or medium by which time is converted into space and space into time. The book amounts to a collection of short discourses on a diversity of topics ranging from elementary anatomy of nerve cell, general plan of central nervous system, and clinical disorders of orientation in space and time to conflicting notions of time held by various physicists and philosophers and evolution of cosmologies from prehistory to present. The treatment of medical and neurobiological topics is cursory, generally

Linguistic anaphors, levels of representation, and discourse

Abstract Four studies contrast the processing of anaphor resolution for two types of anaphors: pronouns and repeated nouns. The studies suggest that in short discourses anaphor resolution occurs more rapidly for pronouns than repeated nouns. In particular, pronouns provide direct access to a conceptual representation of the antecedent, whereas repeated noun anaphors do so indirectly, priming a surface (lexical) level of representation as a preliminary to accessing the conceptual representation. In each study, subjects were presented with an antecedent-related probe (a modifying adjective) following two sentence discourses ending in a pronoun or repeated noun. Subjects were required to make one of three kinds of judgements about the probe word: recognition, category decision, or lexical decision. Facilitation in the category and lexical decisions was compared to indicate the relative Salitence of either conceptual or surface information about the antecedent probe. Results showed stronger facilitation in th...

The Physical Society's Exhibition

THE ninth annual exhibition of the Physical Society of London was held in the Physical Department of the Imperial College of Science on Tuesday, December 16, and attracted the usual large attendance at both afternoon and evening sessions. In addition to the short discourses which have for some years formed a popular feature of the exhibition, a new departure was made by the introduction of several interesting experiments illustrative of recent research. In the exhibition proper about thirty firms showed their most recent forms of apparatus.

The Story of Balaam Reconsidered

DECEMBER 6. THE SINFUL NATION, ISA. I., 1-18. The Book of Isaiah is composed of two parts. The first part consists of the first 39 chapters, and is made up of three groups of short discourses, followed by a historical sketch of the deliverance from Sennacherib, the latter being simply another copy of the account given in 2 Kings. The first verse of the book is the title, either of the first 39 chapters, or of the whole book. The remainder of the chapter is the first prophetic discourse of the book. It is in the form of a public address, perhaps a condensation of a longer address, impassioned, full of imagery, highly poetical in form, rather than itself a poem. We naturally expect this first discourse to be either the earliest discourse in the book, or else an introduction, and therefore nearly the latest written part of it. Perhaps we can determine this question from the state of things described in it, which is likely to have been that which existed when it was written. It is a state of things in which the whole country is stricken throughout, verses 5, 6; devastated by foreign invaders, verse 7; until the daughter of Sion is reduced to the condition of a watch-hut in a vineyard, verse 8; a condition of things in which is prevalent the idolatry of oaks and gardens, verses 21, 29, 30; along with oppression, bribery and corruption, verses 17, 23. It is characterized by murders, verses 21 and 15 b; but also by the outward maintenance of the worship of Jehovah, verses 11 to 15 a. These marks fit the reign of Manasseh, and indicate that the book of the discourses of Isaiah was put together at that date, and this introductory discourse then written. We do not need, however, to know the situation accurately, as preliminary to a profitable use of the chapter itself. Its great value consists in the moral and spiritual principles it enunciates; its doctrines of human sinfulness, of evils resulting therefrom, and of God's eagerness to pardon the repentant. These principles apply directly to our conduct, as they did to the conduct of Israel in Isaiah's time. We need not go a roundabout way through history, to get at them. We have a right to take them directly to ourselves.