Speaker Turns Research Articles

A corpus-driven analysis of repair in a professional ELF meeting: Not ‘letting it pass’

The current study examines turn-taking in a multiparty professional ELF meeting from a bridge-building project in South Asia, using a corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The results show that two of the 15 participants, the Chair and the design consultant, spoke most in the meeting. The Chair took relatively shorter speaker turns, for instance cutting in the conversation and giving corrections or suggestions. We term this discursive practice ‘not let it pass’, in contrast to Firth's (1996) concept of ‘let it pass’, a widely used practice in his business ELF data and other business ELF research. The occurrences of ‘not let it pass’, encompassing other-repair and other-reformulation, practices are analysed in relation to the unfolding discourse, the participants’ goals, and the dynamics of their inter/intra-group relationships. Repair interactions are often observed between members of different institutional groups and nationalities, whereas reformulation interactions were mainly initiated by the Chair with intra-group members. From retrospective interviews, it was clear that a core motivation for the Chair's use of such discursive practices was the comprehension of the audience, rather than the inherent markedness of the message itself. Furthermore, repair fulfils transactional and interpersonal goals, but was not directed at problems of acceptability.

Collaborative participation in aphasic word searching: comparison between significant others and speech and language therapists

Background: Searching for words is a common phenomenon in conversations of people with aphasia. When searching for a word the speaker interrupts the emerging conversational turn with a pause, vocalisation (e.g., uh), and/or a question (e.g., what is it). Previous studies suggest that gazing and pointing can be used to invite conversational partners to join the search.Aims: This study compares the collaborative actions of different conversational partners of people with aphasia (significant others vs. speech and language therapists) during aphasic word searching. The aphasic speakers’ actions inviting assistance from the partners in the search are also examined.Methods & Procedures: The data for the study comprised 20 conversations, half videotaped at the participants’ homes and half in aphasia therapy sessions. The conversations were transcribed and analysed sequentially with a special emphasis on taking non-verbal actions into account. In the analysis, word search sequences were identified and the collaborative participation of the significant others, as well as the speech and language therapists, compared.Outcomes & Results: The analysis showed that institutional and non-institutional conversational partners collaborate in different ways during word searching. When invited to join the search, often non-verbally, the significant others quickly offer words for the aphasic speakers to complete the search. When successful, these immediate completions solve the search and the core conversation can continue. On the other hand, even if invited non-verbally, speech and language therapists do not join in searching by offering words. Instead, they ask questions or offer their candidate understandings that are more elaborate than one word. Furthermore, they regularly shift the speaking turn back to the aphasic speaker encouraging the aphasic speaker to continue the search by him or herself.Conclusions: The institutional and everyday practices of sequential resolutions of word searching differ to a great extent. Everyday conversational practices of collaborative completion appear more effective in solving the search and allow the aphasic speaker to experience smoothly flowing conversational interaction. Everyday practices could also be systematically used within aphasia therapy. Furthermore, if necessary, speech and language therapists should promote the use of these practices within daily interactions of the aphasic clients and their significant others.

The physiological basis of synchronizing conversational rhythms: the role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

During conversation, people tend to converge and become more similar across discourse characteristics, such as producing similar speaking turn lengths and even similar words. This "conversational synchrony" enhances social affiliation and rapport. Here, we investigated the role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in conversational synchrony. We focused on the vmPFC because this region is strongly implicated in social behaviors related to synchrony, such as empathy. To examine the role of the vmPFC role in conversational synchrony, convergence of total words and words per turn were measured in the discourse of participants with bilateral vmPFC damage, healthy comparison participants (CP), and a brain-damaged comparison group with bilateral hippocampal damage (HPC) as they interacted with an unfamiliar partner. CP and HPC interactions displayed convergence as the interactants' productions of words and words per turn became more similar across the sessions. In striking contrast, vmPFC interactions did not display convergence for either variable. A follow-up experiment revealed the same lack of convergence in the interactions of vmPFC participants with a more familiar conversational partner. Our results suggest that vmPFC is a crucial part of the neurobiological system that supports the ability to synchronize conversational rhythms by dynamically adjusting behavior to the social environment.

Segmentation Strategies for Passage Retrieval from Internet Video using Speech Transcripts

We compare the effect of different segmentation strategies for passage retrieval of user generated internet video. We consider retrieval of passages for rather abstract and complex queries that go beyond finding a certain object or constellation of objects in the visual channel. Hence the retrieval methods have to rely heavily on the recognized speech. Passage retrieval has mainly been studied to improve document retrieval and to enable question answering. In these domains best results were obtained using passages defined by the paragraph structure of the source documents or by using arbitrary overlapping passages. For the retrieval of relevant passages in a video no author defined paragraph structure is available. We compare retrieval results from 5 different types of segments: segments defined by shot boundaries, prosodic segments, fixed length segments, a sliding window and semantically coherent segments based on speech transcripts. We evaluated the methods on the corpus of the MediaEval 2011 Rich Speech Retrieval task. Our main conclusions are (1) that fixed length and coherent segments are clearly superior to segments based on speaker turns or shot boundaries; (2) that the retrieval results highly depend on the right choice for the segment length; and (3) that results using the segmentation into semantically coherent parts depend much less on the segment length. Especially, the quality of fixed length and sliding window segmentation drops fast when the segment length increases, while quality of the semantically coherent segments is much more stable. Thus, if coherent segments are defined, longer segments can be used and consequently fewer segments have to be considered at retrieval time.

Hearing-impaired recipients’ non-vocal action sets as a resource for collaboration in conversation

This article reports findings from a conversation analytic (CA) study concerning the occurrence of the non-vocal actions by the hearing-impaired (HI) recipients of talk and the consequences that these actions have for each speaker's ongoing turn in their dyadic interactions. The action sets that were analyzed include gaze shifts and leaning forward, turning one ear toward the speaker, the facial, expression of a frown, and following these, immobility. This article argues that these non-vocal actions are consequential actions of the HI recipient and they strengthen the recipient's collaboration with the speaker. These collaborative procedures are points on a continuum and these include perceptual strain, partial misperception, or more substantial misperception. The speakers interpreted the nonvocal actions according to the ongoing sequence, and for this reason, their responses varied, but they also reflected the speaker's knowledge of the HI recipient's hearing impairment. The non-vocal actions of trouble differ from the verbal other-initiations of repair (e.g. What?). This difference may serve a specific function in HI-conversations; the non-vocal actions that occur simultaneously with the speaker's turn enable the sharing of the HI recipient's perceptual uncertainty in a face-saving manner without explicitly disturbing the conversational flow.

The Wor(l)d is a Collage: Multi‐Performance by Chinese Heritage Language Speakers

ABSTRACTThis study examines the simultaneous use of English and Chinese by speakers of Chinese as a heritage language (CHL). It focuses on spontaneous, dynamic, and high‐density mixing of the two languages within the smallest building block of a speaking turn: the turn constructional unit (TCU). Drawing upon data from different age and proficiency groups, it shows that CHL speakers migrate between and mingle the two language systems freely and frequently at multiple and nested levels of phonemes, morphemes, syllable structures, tones, noun and verb phrases, and clauses. It reconsiders existing syntactic descriptions, sociopragmatic taxonomies, and conversation‐analytic accounts concerning codeswitching and concludes that rather than being governed by fixed, a priori linguistic constraints, sociopragmatic meaning, or conversation‐sequential contingency, this type of ad hoc, intra‐TCU codeswitching is accomplished with a full range of verbal resources from both languages that are simultaneously accessible to the speaker and might be accounted for by a type of rationality characterized by fuzzy logical conditions. It further suggests that, pushing and breaking perceptible linguistic boundaries, CHL speakers celebrate their multi‐competence, traverse invisible cultural and identity boundaries, and employ and enjoy both languages at all ages and proficiency levels in transient and transcendent multi‐performances, which in turn can become a rich resource for heritage language socialization across the lifespan.

The prosody of question tags in English

The prosodic realization of English question tags (QTs) has received some interest in the literature; yet corpus studies on the factors affecting their phrasing and intonational realization are very rare or limited to a certain aspect. This article presents a quantitative corpus study of 370 QTs from theInternational Corpus of Englishthat were annotated for prosodic phrasing and intonational realization of the QT and the host. Factors tested were polarity, position in the sentence and the turn as well as verb type. Generally, prosodic phrasing and intonational realization were highly correlated: separate QTs were mostly realized with a falling contour, while integrated QTs were mostly rising. Results from regression models showed a strong effect of polarity: QTs with an opposite polarity were more often phrased separately compared to QTs with constant polarity, but the phrasing of opposite polarity QTs was further dependent on whether the QT was negative or positive (more separate phrasing in negative QTs). Furthermore, prosodic separation was more frequent at the end of syntactic phrases and clauses compared to phrase-medial QTs. At the end of a turn, speakers realized more rising contours compared to QTs within a speaker's turn. Verb type also had an effect on the phrasing of the tag. Taken together, our results confirm some of the claims previously held for QTs, while others are modified and new findings are added.

Linking Prognoses, Treatment Paths, and Values in Goals-of-Care Conversations (FR424-A)

1.Identify six processes embedded in goals-of-care conversations.2.Describe how palliative care clinicians pursue patient-centered care in the context of worsening patient prognosis. Goals-of-care discussions are core components in PC consultation, especially in the context of changing, usually worsening, prognosis. Despite evidence that these discussions improve outcomes, there is little empirical evidence describing how they occur in their natural setting. The aim of this study was to describe content and processes of prognostic communication in the context of palliative care consultation goals of care discussions. Audio recordings from 71 inpatient PC consultations; 66 of which contained some discussion of prognosis. We coded each speaker turn in the conversation—referred to as a conversation segment—for the presence of prognostic communication. All conversation segments containing prognostic communication were transcribed verbatim, entered into Atlas. TI, and analyzed using Dimensional Analysis. The unit of analysis was the segment. Layers of multiple and often conditional prognoses were interwoven with patient values and goals to help convey to patients that their current illness path would not deliver them to their hoped for destination. Using the travel language grounded in the data, we found six main processes which were often combined: A) locating the patient on the path, B) looking ahead to path destinations, C) creating new destinations, D) changing paths and identifying crossroads, E) the experience (eg, speed and difficulty) of the path, and F) linking with patient values and goals. Participants contextualized the favorable or unfavorable direction of potential paths and destinations on the concordance with patient's values and clinically feasible goals. Prognostic conversations established connections between patients’ clinical conditions, possible treatment options, how treatments might be experienced, and their likely outcomes. These processes allowed for nuanced discussions of patients’ goals in the context of clinical feasibility.

Position offerings in German radio phone-in talk shows

Taking the example of a German radio phone-in talk show, this study discusses the forms and functions of “position offerings”. Position offerings are accomplished by means of outlining the social, ideological and moral dimensions of candidate positions and giving other discourse participants the choice to adopt, to negotiate or to reject them. Fundamentally, mono-position and bi-position offerings can be distinguished between. Mono-position offerings establish one candidate position as an issue to deal with by the addressee while bi-position offerings comprise two candidate positions as alternatives. Both mono-position and bi-position offerings are correlated with the institutional and genre-specific conditions of radio phone-in talk shows. In particular, they are employed by the host of the show but not by the caller, and they do not occur immediately at the beginning of an interaction but are a resource for ongoing topic talk. Furthermore, position offerings are a subtle but powerful resource for conducting a conversation: Mono-position offerings can be integrated into the prior speaker's turn in order to increase his readiness to accept it, and bi-position offerings tend to draw the addressee's attention to the positions being offered while keeping him or her away from introducing a completely new position. All in all, the dialogical accomplishment of position offerings in radio phone-in talk shows represents one way in which social and moral facets of conversational identities can be negotiated in talk-in-interaction with regard to genre-specific roles such as “host” and “caller/guest”.

Automatic Role Recognition in Multiparty Conversations: An Approach Based on Turn Organization, Prosody, and Conditional Random Fields

Roles are a key aspect of social interactions, as they contribute to the overall predictability of social behavior (a necessary requirement to deal effectively with the people around us), and they result in stable, possibly machine-detectable behavioral patterns (a key condition for the application of machine intelligence technologies). This paper proposes an approach for the automatic recognition of roles in conversational broadcast data, in particular, news and talk shows. The approach makes use of behavioral evidence extracted from speaker turns and applies conditional random fields to infer the roles played by different individuals. The experiments are performed over a large amount of broadcast material (around 50 h), and the results show an accuracy higher than 85%.

Privacy-sensitive audio features for conversational speech processing

The work described in this thesis takes place in the context of capturing real-life audio for the analysis of spontaneous social interactions. Towards this goal, we wish to capture conversational and ambient sounds using portable audio recorders. Analysis of conversations can then proceed by modeling the speaker turns and durations produced by speaker diarization. However, a key factor against the ubiquitous capture of real-life audio is privacy. Particularly, recording and storing raw audio would breach the privacy of people whose consent has not been explicitly obtained.

Therapist interventions in short-term dynamic psychotherapy: six expert treatments

This paper describes the profile of verbal response modes utilised in the expert application of Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (STDP). One hundred and fifteen randomly selected segments from six treatments of STDP were analysed. Trained raters used a verbal response mode coding system to examine the individual speaking turns of an expert therapist. Based on the profile of therapist interventions reported, it was concluded that the actual conduct of this treatment in routine practice illustrates the empirically informed modifications to STDP technique integrated alongside the common characteristics of STDP based on the therapist (i) adopting an active stance, (ii) maintaining treatment focus using frequent confrontations and the ‘Triangle of Conflict’, and (iii) tailoring treatment to participant functioning using a combination of supportive and expressive interventions. Furthermore, specific differences in therapist activity were observed across treatment phases as well as between participants.

Prediction of Turn-Ends Based on Anticipation of Upcoming Words

During conversation listeners have to perform several tasks simultaneously. They have to comprehend their interlocutor’s turn, while also having to prepare their own next turn. Moreover, a careful analysis of the timing of natural conversation reveals that next speakers also time their turns very precisely. This is possible only if listeners can predict accurately when the speaker’s turn is going to end. But how are people able to predict when a turn-ends? We propose that people know when a turn-ends, because they know how it ends. We conducted a gating study to examine if better turn-end predictions coincide with more accurate anticipation of the last words of a turn. We used turns from an earlier button-press experiment where people had to press a button exactly when a turn-ended. We show that the proportion of correct guesses in our experiment is higher when a turn’s end was estimated better in time in the button-press experiment. When people were too late in their anticipation in the button-press experiment, they also anticipated more words in our gating study. We conclude that people made predictions in advance about the upcoming content of a turn and used this prediction to estimate the duration of the turn. We suggest an economical model of turn-end anticipation that is based on anticipation of words and syntactic frames in comprehension.

Conversational gaze mechanisms for humanlike robots

During conversations, speakers employ a number of verbal and nonverbal mechanisms to establish who participates in the conversation, when, and in what capacity. Gaze cues and mechanisms are particularly instrumental in establishing the participant roles of interlocutors, managing speaker turns, and signaling discourse structure. If humanlike robots are to have fluent conversations with people, they will need to use these gaze mechanisms effectively. The current work investigates people's use of key conversational gaze mechanisms, how they might be designed for and implemented in humanlike robots, and whether these signals effectively shape human-robot conversations. We focus particularly on whether humanlike gaze mechanisms might help robots signal different participant roles, manage turn-exchanges, and shape how interlocutors perceive the robot and the conversation. The evaluation of these mechanisms involved 36 trials of three-party human-robot conversations. In these trials, the robot used gaze mechanisms to signal to its conversational partners their roles either of two addressees, an addressee and a bystander, or an addressee and a nonparticipant. Results showed that participants conformed to these intended roles 97% of the time. Their conversational roles affected their rapport with the robot, feelings of groupness with their conversational partners, and attention to the task.

Patient affect experiencing following therapist interventions in short-term dynamic psychotherapy

The aim of this research was to examine the relationship between therapist interventions and patient affect responses in Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (STDP). The Affect Experiencing subscale from the Achievement of Therapeutic Objectives Scale (ATOS) was adapted to measure individual immediate affect experiencing (I-AES) responses in relation to therapist interventions coded within the preceding speaking turn, using the Psychotherapy Interaction Coding (PIC) system. A hierarchical linear modelling procedure was used to assess the change in affect experiencing and the relationship between affect experiencing and therapist interventions within and across segments of therapy. Process data was taken from six STDP cases; in total 24 hours of video-taped sessions were examined. Therapist interventions were found to account for a statistically significant amount of variance in immediate affect experiencing. Higher levels of immediate affect experiencing followed the therapist's use of Confrontation, Clarification and Support compared to Questions, Self-disclosure and Information interventions. Therapist Confrontation interventions that attempted to direct pressure towards either the visceral experience of affect or a patient's defences against feelings led to the highest levels of immediate affect experiencing. The type of therapist intervention accounts for a small but significant amount of the variation observed in a patient's immediate emotional arousal. Empirical findings support clinical theory in STDP that suggests strategic verbal responses promote the achievement of this specific therapeutic objective.

Collaborative interaction in turn-taking: a comparative study of European bilingual (CLIL) and mainstream (MS) foreign language learners in early secondary education

This paper explores the emergence of collaborative interaction among early secondary learners in bilingual sections at state schools in Andalusia. These sections are organised in line with a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) approach. By transcribing and then analysing data from oral interviews conducted with randomly selected pairs of CLIL learners and mainstream (MS) peers, the article compares and discusses the quantity and quality of collaboration evidenced in turn-taking patterns. In doing so it also proposes a pragmatic, participant-based approach to the initial classification of turns, prior to more functionally aligned analysis. Four initial turn types are identified in the data but while all four obviously contribute to the overall ongoing talk, only two are deemed inherently collaborative. These are embedded turns, where one speaker contributes to another speaker's main turn, and cooperative turns, where two or more speakers jointly construct the message. Once identified, each of these turn types was examined for patterns of functional use. The research finds that the CLIL learners are participating both more frequently and more effectively in collaborative turns than their MS counterparts. In closing we briefly discuss some of the implications of this finding.

Confirming understanding and acknowledging assistance: Managing trouble responsibility in response to understanding check in Japanese talk-in-interaction

When a recipient of a turn-at-talk has a problem in hearing/understanding, one way for initiating repair is to offer a “candidate understanding” of that turn for confirmation/disconfirmation. This practice is, however, sometimes open to being regarded by the trouble-source speaker as providing a ‘better’ alternative for his/her formulation in the prior turn, because a candidate understanding contains different words than those used in the prior turn. Through an analysis of Japanese talk-in-interaction, this study argues that: (1) the practice of offering a candidate understanding is not only recognizable as checking understanding but can also be contingently recognizable as assisting the trouble-source speaker in formulating what s/he wanted/wants to say. (2) Among the two types of confirmation tokens in Japanese, a nn-type token is a resource for simply confirming the repair-initiating speaker's understanding, whereas a soo-type token is a resource for acknowledging his/her assistance in reformulating the trouble-source speaker's turn. (3) By responding with a soo-type token in response to an offer of a candidate understanding, the trouble-source speaker can display his/her stance to the fact that the recipient has assisted in solving a trouble in speaking and that s/he (the speaker) is responsible for the trouble.

Transition relevance and the phonetic design of English call openings

Abstract Recent work at the interface of phonetics and Conversation Analysis has been concerned with the functional import of the phonetic design of talk. One particular challenge has been to understand how and if the phonetic design of talk affects its interpretation. This paper examines the impact of phonetic design on sequential structure and it’s role in signalling transition relevance. Focusing on call openings the paper examines whether different/same phonetics have different/same effects at different/same places in interactional structure. In order to do so, it considers the role of pitch contours and other phonetic features in first spoken turns ( T1) in signalling transition relevance. It examines whether certain pitch-contour shapes deployed at T1 result in different uptakes by the recipient and producer of the second turn ( T2). The analysis shows that: • the function of turn-final pitch accents at T1 is to project possible transition relevance; • at this place in interactional structure the choice between final rising and falling contours is constrained by the lexico-syntactic design of the turn; • callers’ actions at T2 are not conditioned by the prosodic design of T1. These findings raise theoretical and methodological issues about the study of prosodic features of speech.

Speech timing and pausing in children with specific language impairment

Articulation rate, speaking rate, as well as the duration and location of pauses, were analysed in 10 children with specific language impairment (SLI) and a comparison group of seven younger children producing utterances of similar lengths. Children with SLI were significantly slower in articulation rate, but not speaking rate or pausing time, indicating a group difference attributable to longer syllable duration. The correlation between the duration of the pause preceding a child's speaking turn and the length of the subsequent child utterance was calculated as an indication of children's use of the pause for planning the utterance. The correlation was not significant in either group, and not significantly different between groups. An analysis of the position of pauses within speaking turns showed more syllables following than preceding the pause, with no significant group differences. Theoretical implications are discussed.

Exploring pharmacists’ communication with customers through screening services

Objective To describe pharmacist–customer communication, during blood pressure and capillary cholesterol services, in a community pharmacy setting. Methods Participants were purposively selected and data collected by audio-recording. The encounters’ verbal content was transcribed verbatim, utterances identified, time stamped, and classified according to a coding scheme of 15 categories. Four dialogue structures were analyzed: speaker turn, interactivity, turn density and turn duration. Results Eighty-three episodes were registered (51 blood pressure, 32 cholesterol). The average blood pressure episode lasted 5:35 min, with 81.2 utterances (55.3% customers), and an interactivity rate of 7 turns/min. The average cholesterol episode took 7:05 min, with 135.3 utterances (52.7% pharmacists), and an interactivity rate of 13.3 turns/min. In both cases, pharmacists asked more questions (mainly closed ones), while customers gave more information. An increased number of speaker turns and closed questions were associated to higher systolic pressure. No correlations were identified with cholesterol values. Conclusion It would seem that pharmacists tend to control the exchange and its content through closed questioning. Although talk dominance is balanced, hypertensive episodes induce a higher information search. Practice implications Educational interventions, focusing on pharmacists’ communication competencies, should be available to favor interaction skills resulting in a customer's augment of proactive information seeking behaviour.