Behavior Of Speakers Research Articles

THE IMPORTANCE OF STUDENT’S SOCIOCULTURAL COMPETENCE DURING THEIR FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDIES

The article analyzes the social component of the updated speech portrait of a university specialist. The sociocultural dominant of intercultural speech interaction is determined by the position of the individual in the social system, the situation of communication, his profession, region of origin, and age. In this regard, the subjects of communication are faced with various features of communication: this is communicative behavior, the cultural space of communication, the linguistic personality of a foreign language with an individually formed picture of the world. English language instruction at the Language Pedagogical Institute is governed by educational standards that call for a move to higher level of foreign language skill as measured by the mainstream European scale of non-native language proficiency. When learning a foreign language, particular focus should be placed on the practical aspects of mastering the language while taking into account contemporary linguistic trends, motivating factors, and the psychology-pedagogical aspects of oral speaking. Learning a foreign language becomes a creative process that opens up the culture and mindset of the nation where it is being learned. If a sociocultural aspect of learning foreign language content is fully realized, this will encourage students' interest in the subject and lead to more fully realized language mastery. The sociocultural field of research concerned with instructing the interpretation of foreign language speech is taken into consideration at the junction of competency-based and intercultural approaches. Emphasis is placed on the value of learning how to identify and evaluate the significance of social elements' influences on a speaker's speech behavior.

On Linguicism, Epistemic Injustice, and Research in Language‐in‐Education: A Commentary on “Midadolescents’ Language Learning at School: Toward More Just and Scientifically Rigorous Practices in Research and Education”

On Linguicism, Epistemic Injustice, and Research in Language‐in‐Education: A Commentary on “Midadolescents’ Language Learning at School: Toward More Just and Scientifically Rigorous Practices in Research and Education”

Теория на аргументацията на Хаим Перелман

Abstract: This article includes a review of the basic scientific publications of Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. Attempts to reconceptualize ancient rhetoric in its part on argumentation are presented. Conclusions are drawn after reviewing the publications of other scholars studying argumentation. It is presented as part of fundamental rhetorical knowledge, together with projections into the legal/legal sphere and into politics. Projections of argumentation in the speaker's behavior and in his goal to achieve persuasion while respecting ethical norms, rules and morality are identified. Intersections between rhetoric, philosophy, and argumentation are presented. The contribution of rhetoric to humanistic knowledge is demonstrated through a critical review of the scholarly publications of Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrecht-Tyteca and other scholars publishing in the fields of rhetoric and philosophy in the 20th and 21st centuries. Keywords: rhetoric, argumentation, argument, philosophy, Haim Perelman, Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca.

COMMUNICATIVE STRATEGIES OF PRESIDENTIAL DISCOURSE (BASED ON SPEECHES BY V. ZELENSKY)

The research is performed in the linguopragmatic aspect, which involves the actualization of the communicative interaction of the speaker and the recipient in different types of discourse. The object of analysis was the presidential discourse as a manifestation of political discourse. The public speeches and addresses of the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky delivered in 2019-2021 are considered. The concept of communicative strategy as the main parameter of communicative interaction is defined and the approaches of linguists to this concept are generalized. The texts of presidential speeches are analyzed and the main communication strategies are singled out. A typology of strategies is proposed, which includes self-presentation, consolidation, agony, argumentation, discrediting, manipulativeness, authority, declarativeness, motivation and ritual. Each of the strategies is described based on illustrative material and characteristic features of the speaker's communicative behavior.

An experimental analysis of gender-biased verbal behavior and self-editing using an online chat analog.

The current study investigated the effects of female and male audiences on gender-biased verbal behavior and self-editing using an online chat environment analog. The chat analog allowed access to self-editing behaviors, which are frequently covert, thus providing additional information about verbal episodes. We examined whether the strength and the dimensions of verbal responses differentially varied across the female and male audience conditions using visual inspection and statistical analysis. Participants were 28 typically developing adults. Overt responses were recorded for interrupting, and both overt and covert responses were recorded for disagreeing, pressuring, and self-editing. Visual inspection revealed differentiated overt and covert disagreeing, pressuring, and interrupting for some participants, while statistical analysis using Fisher's exact test did not reveal significant differences in the dependent variables between audience's perceived gender and participants' gender. Differentiated responding between female and male audiences suggests that perceived gender can exert stimulus control over a speaker's behavior. Although we didn't observe consistent gender-biased responding for all the participants, our experimental evaluation functions as a proof-of-concept study that can encourage the use of this methodology to study complex social behavior.

What Makes Epistemic Injustice an “Injustice”?

What Makes Epistemic Injustice an “Injustice”?

Linguistic Personology – Potential in Phonoscopic Expertise

The study attempts to justify the development of linguistic personology in Bulgaria as an interdisciplinary scientific paradigm, which comprises theoretical foundations of psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, linguistic pragmatics, semiotics and phonоstylistics. The applied aspect of the approach consists in describing speaker's physiognomic expressions and speech markers, and their anthropological characteristics, which enable researchers to present a speech profile of the respective person through two parameters: their personal identity and personal voice with its unique inherent features. Linguistic personology through speech as an autonomous interdisciplinary research paradigm, serves in forensic (phonoscopic) expertise for the speakers' characteristics diagnostics, considering typical voice peculiarities. The approach studies speaker's verbal behaviour and distinctive features of his or her personal identity signaled by personal voice expression measured through linguistic (phonoscopic) expertise. Linguistic personology through speech is a unique method of personality typization as well as characterizing the speaker based on the analysis of his / her specific pronunciation and voice transformation, used in the field of forensic phonetics. It is proposed to supplement the expert assessment with the results of acoustic analysis of voice samples, as well as their perception, for more objective identification of matching linguistic data. The article represents speech excerpts, the acoustic images of which demonstrate audio-and-visual comprehension of gender differentiation of speakers, whose voices indicate that the recipients belong to the diagnosed group of men, women or transvestites.

Polite addressing and its linguistic representation

The article analyses interpretation of the category of addressee in the scientific literature, presents the specifics of the linguistic representation of polite addressee in the Ukrainian language. The features of the category of addressee and its linguistic representation from the point of sociolinguistic criteria view are described. Polite addressing is considered as a set of special linguistic indicators that represent communicative interaction, a certain instrument of influencing the addressee, which are sometimes more effective than communication itself. In addition, the emphasis is made on sociolinguistic, national and cultural features of the category of addressees. Polite addressee is regarded as a certain pragmatic vector that determines and regulates the strategy of the speaker's communicative behaviour, influencing the choice and use of language indicators, the specifics of linguistic means of expressing polite addressee use. Linguistic indicators of polite addressee, which are used by the speaker in order to establish a successful communicative act are highlighted and described. The category of addressee is not limited to implementation within one part of speech, since the addressee expressiveness is concentrated in pronouns, nouns and verbs that can name or indicate the addressee, thus the category of addressee is a cross-cutting category inherent not only to one part of speech. The main specialized grammatical indicators of polite addressee expression in the Ukrainian language are personal pronouns ти, Ви, addressee-personal verb forms, vocative case of nouns, imperative verbs, words of the addressee category (vocative and addressee intensifiers dear, respected, etc.), in which the addressee is lexicalized function. From the point of polite addressing view, speakers use a number of linguistic indicators that perform an appellative, phatic, regulatory, connotative, national-cultural function, pragmatically loaded and modally labelled to represent relationships. The authors claim that functional load of a polite addressee is to prepare the conditions for successful implementation of a communicative act. The semantics of the addressee is determined by speech contact, relationship between the communicants, communication situation and the speaker's intention.

Flexible predictions during listening comprehension: Speaker reliability affects anticipatory processes

During listening comprehension, the identification of individual words can be strongly influenced by properties of the preceding context. While sentence context can facilitate both behavioral and neural responses, it is unclear whether these effects can be attributed to the pre-activation of lexico-semantic features or the facilitated integration of contextually congruent words. Moreover, little is known about how statistics of the broader language environment, or information about the current speaker, might shape these facilitation effects. In the present study, we measured neural responses to predictable and unpredictable words as participants listened to sentences for comprehension. Critically, we manipulated the reliability of each speaker's utterances, such that individual speakers either tended to complete sentences with words that were highly predictable (reliable speaker) or with words that were unpredictable but still plausible (unreliable speaker). As expected, the amplitude of the N400 was reduced for locally predictable words, but, critically, these context effects were also modulated by speaker identity. Sentences from a reliable speaker showed larger facilitation effects with an earlier onset, suggesting that listeners engaged in enhanced anticipatory processing when a speaker's behavior was more predictable. This finding suggests that listeners can implicitly track the reliability of predictive cues in their environment and use these statistics to adaptively regulate predictive processing.

Evidential Strength of Intonational Cues and Rational Adaptation to (Un-)Reliable Intonation.

Intonation plays an integral role in comprehending spoken language. Listeners can rapidly integrate intonational information to predictively map a given pitch accent onto the speaker's likely referential intentions. We use mouse tracking to investigate two questions: (a) how listeners draw predictive inferences based on information from intonation? and (b) how listeners adapt their online interpretation of intonational cues when these are reliable or unreliable? We formulate a novel Bayesian model of rational predictive cue integration and explore predictions derived under a concrete linking hypothesis relating a quantitative notion of evidential strength of a cue to the moment in time, relative to the unfolding speech signal, at which mouse trajectories turn towards the eventually selected option. In order to capture rational belief updates after concrete observations of a speaker's behavior, we formulate and explore an extension of this model that includes the listener's hierarchical beliefs about the speaker's likely production behavior. Our results are compatible with the assumption that listeners rapidly and rationally integrate all available intonational information, that they expect reliable intonational information initially, and that they adapt these initial expectations gradually during exposition to unreliable input. All materials, data, and scripts can be retrieved here: https://osf.io/dnbuk/.

Facilitating the emergence of convergent intraverbals in children with autism.

Convergent intraverbals represent a specific type of intraverbal in which multiple components of one speaker's verbal behavior control a specific verbal response from another speaker (e.g., Speaker 1: What wooly, horned animal lives in the high country? Speaker 2: Bighorn sheep). To foster the development of advanced language, Sundberg and Sundberg (2011) proposed prerequisite skills that may engender the emergence of novel, convergent intraverbals. We used a multiple-probe design with both nonconcurrent (across participants) and concurrent (across stimulus sets) components to evaluate the effects of training these prerequisite skills on the emergence of convergent intraverbals with four children with autism. Participants showed the emergence of convergent intraverbals at mastery levels after they displayed mastery performance on all of the prerequisite skills identified by Sundberg and Sundberg, lending support to their characterization as prerequisites. We discuss these findings in terms of operant mechanisms that may facilitate the development of generative language.

(Simulated) listener gaze in real‐time spoken interaction

AbstractGaze is an important aspect of social communication. Previous research has concentrated mainly on the role of speaker gaze and listener gaze in isolation, neglecting the effect of the listener's gaze behavior on the speaker's behavior. This paper presents an exploratory eye‐tracking study involving an interactive human‐like agent following participants' gaze. This study demonstrates that a rather simple gaze‐following mechanism convincingly simulates active listening behavior engaging the speaker. The study also highlights how speakers rely on their interlocutors' gaze when establishing common references.

Effect of a Hearer's Politeness on Multimodal Behaviors in Speech

This paper investigates the effect of a hearer's attitude toward a speaker's multimodal behaviors. Twenty-one university students, nine males and twelve females, participated in this expe...

Repetition and Reactance in Graham’s "Underneath" Poems

The present paper gives a detailed analysis and interpretation of 16 poems in Jorie Graham's collection, Swarm (2000), which bear "UNDERNEATH" as their main titles. The poems are marked with different types of repetition such as graphological repetition, word, phrase, and sentential repetition, semantic repetition, and syntactic repetition. The study draws on Lakoff and Johnson's theories on metaphor and Brehm and Brehm’s reactance theory. It is argued "underneath" is a conceptual (orientational) metaphor which signifies a state of being limited, lack of control and freedom, and loss of power. The paper investigates the speaker's reactant behavior in "Underneath" poems, seeking a way to restore her lost freedom. Reactance behaviors can be skepticism, inertia, aggression, and resistance. It is concluded despite her thematic inertia, representing her submission to the oppressed state, her stylistic reactance reflected in repetitions, innovations, and disruptive diction stands for her attempts to regain her lost control.

Multimodal Analysis and Prediction of Persuasiveness in Online Social Multimedia

Our lives are heavily influenced by persuasive communication, and it is essential in almost any type of social interaction from business negotiation to conversation with our friends and family. With the rapid growth of social multimedia websites, it is becoming ever more important and useful to understand persuasiveness in the context of social multimedia content online. In this article, we introduce a newly created multimedia corpus of 1,000 movie review videos with subjective annotations of persuasiveness and related high-level characteristics or attributes (e.g., confidence). This dataset will be made freely available to the research community. We designed our experiments around the following five main research hypotheses. First, we study if computational descriptors derived from verbal and nonverbal behavior can be predictive of persuasiveness. We further explore combining descriptors from multiple communication modalities (acoustic, verbal, para-verbal, and visual) for predicting persuasiveness and compare with using a single modality alone. Second, we investigate how certain high-level attributes, such as credibility or expertise, are related to persuasiveness and how the information can be used in modeling and predicting persuasiveness. Third, we investigate differences when speakers are expressing a positive or negative opinion and if the opinion polarity has any influence in the persuasiveness prediction. Fourth, we further study if gender has any influence in the prediction performance. Last, we test if it is possible to make comparable predictions of persuasiveness by only looking at thin slices (i.e., shorter time windows) of a speaker's behavior.

The Speaker's Behavior in Court Interpreting and Its Influence on Translated Discourse Quality : Case Study Ouargla Court of Justice, Algeria

The Speaker's Behavior in Court Interpreting and Its Influence on Translated Discourse Quality : Case Study Ouargla Court of Justice, Algeria

Teaching children with autism to respond to conversation partners' interest.

Successful conversation requires that the speaker's behavior is sensitive to nonvocal listener responses. We observed children with autism spectrum disorder during conversation probes in which a listener periodically displayed nonvocal cues that she was uninterested in the conversation. We used behavioral skills training to teach conversation skills. First, we taught participants to tact nonvocal listener behavior (interested or uninterested), but this was insufficient to improve responding aimed at regaining listener interest. Participants were then taught to ask a question (Experiments 1 and 2) or change the topic (Experiment 2) when the listener was uninterested. Responding persisted over time and with changes in the stimulus conditions. The behavior change was also deemed socially valid by blind observers. In Experiment 3, participants learned to shift to the other trained response when exposed to extinction. This study illustrates a set of procedures for bringing speaker behavior under control of nonvocal listener cues.

Referent-Based Verbal Behavior Instruction for Children with Autism.

Skinner's (1957) analysis of verbal behavior deconstructed language according to stimulus control. Although the functional independence of these verbal operants has been empirically demonstrated, more commonly, a speaker's verbal behavior is induced by a convergence of controlling stimuli. However, circumscribed stimulus control may inhibit the development of complex verbal repertoires for some individuals, including those with autism spectrum disorders. For this reason, in the current paper, we propose a behavior analytic intervention with the overarching goal of establishing multiple control over verbal behavior through the conditioning of referent stimuli.Referent-based instruction emphasizes teaching the operant class over specific targetsMultiple control is established by converging verbal behavior around the referentProgress is measured in terms of a stimulus control ratioEliminates arbitrary decision making.

Two Types of Implicature: Material and Behavioural

AbstractThis article argues that what Grice termed ‘particularized conversational implicatures’ can be divided into two types. In some cases, it is possible to reconstruct the inference from the explicit content of the utterance to the implicature without employing a premise to the effect that that the speaker expressed that content (by means of an utterance). I call these ‘material implicatures’. Those whose reconstruction relies on a premise about the speaker's verbal behaviour, by contrast, I call ‘behavioural implicatures’. After showing that the division is theoretically significant, I ask whether current pragmatic theory is able to accommodate it. I conclude that, while (neo)‐Gricean pragmatics cannot do so straightforwardly, the distinction is already implicit in Relevance Theory. The article ends by considering the question of whether, in the light of previous discussion, speaker meaning really is always an instance of non‐natural meaning.

Im/politeness, social practice and the participation order

Im/politeness is often conceptualised as the hearer's evaluation of a speaker's behaviour in discursive politeness research, representing the broader concern with the participant's perspective in current im/politeness research. Yet despite the importance afforded evaluations in such approaches, the notion of evaluation itself has remained, with just a few notable exceptions, remarkably under-theorised in pragmatics. In this paper it is proposed, building on work from discursive psychology and ethnomethodology, that im/politeness evaluations are intimately inter-related with the interactional achievement of social actions and pragmatic meanings vis-à-vis the moral order, and thus evaluations of im/politeness can be ultimately understood as a form of social practice. However, it is argued that an analysis of im/politeness as social practice necessitates a move away from a simplistic speaker–hearer model of interaction to a consideration of the broader participation framework (Goffman, 1981) within which they arise, and the positioning of the analysts vis-à-vis that participation order. A key finding from close analysis of evaluations of im/politeness in interaction relative to these participation footings is that they are distributed, variable and cumulative in nature.