Speaker's Use Research Articles

The use of content and timing to predict turn transitions.

For addressees to respond in a timely fashion, they cannot simply process the speaker's utterance as it occurs and wait till it finishes. Instead, they predict both when the speaker will conclude and what linguistic forms will be used. While doing this, they must also prepare their own response. To explain this, we draw on the account proposed by Pickering and Garrod (2013a), in which addressees covertly imitate the speaker's utterance and use this to determine the intention that underlies their upcoming utterance. They use this intention to predict when and how the utterance will end, and also to drive their own production mechanisms for preparing their response. Following Arnal and Giraud (2012), we distinguish between mechanisms that predict timing and content. In particular, we propose that the timing mechanism relies on entrainment of low-frequency oscillations between speech envelope and brain. This constrains the context that feeds into the determination of the speaker's intention and hence the timing and form of the upcoming utterance. This approach typically leads to well-timed contributions, but also provides a mechanism for resolving conflicts, for example when there is unintended speaker overlap.

The Pragmatics of Slurs

AbstractI argue that the offense generation pattern of slurring terms parallels that of impoliteness behaviors, and is best explained by appeal to similar purely pragmatic mechanisms. In choosing to use a slurring termratherthan its neutral counterpart, the speaker signals that she endorses the term (and its associations). Such an endorsement warrants offense, and consequently slurs generate offense whenever a speaker's use demonstrates a contrastive preference for the slurring term. Since this explanation comes at low theoretical cost and imposes few constraints on an account of the semantics of slurs, this suggests that we should not require semantic accounts to provide an independent explanation of the offense profile.

Young children use shared experience to interpret definite reference

We investigated whether children at the ages of two and three years understand that a speaker's use of the definite article specifies a referent that is in common ground between speaker and listener. An experimenter and a child engaged in joint actions in which the experimenter chose one of three similar objects of the same category to perform an action. In subsequent interactions children were asked to get 'the X' or 'a X'. When children were instructed with the definite article they chose the shared object significantly more often than when they were instructed with the indefinite article in which case children's choice was at chance. The findings show that in their third year children use shared experiences to interpret the speaker's communicative intention underlying her referential choice. The results are discussed with respect to children's representation of linguistic categories and the role of joint action for establishing common ground.

Development of Slim Speaker for Use in Flat TVs

Slim designs have become one of the main concerns in the development of flat digital televisions (TVs). The speaker dimensions play an important role in determining the total thickness of a TV. Conventional slim speakers contain two circular magnetic circuits. This design limits the speaker width and thereby affects the performance. This paper presents a novel slim speaker that aims at reducing the frame limitations. Electrodynamic analyses for conventional and novel designs are conducted by using finite element method (FEM). Optimization of novel design is operated by design of experiment (DOE) method and the response surface methodology (RSM). As a result, the slim speaker width has been decreased by 12.5%. Rated sensitivity of A-weighted sound pressure level (SPL) is selected to characterize the acoustic performance. The simulations and experiments reveal that the rated sensitivity shows an increase of 1.6 dBA compared to conventional slim speakers.

How young adults address their parents reflects their perception of parenting

A speaker's use of a title for the listener shows the speaker's deference to the listener. Previous studies suggested that the use of kinship terms in the family also shows deference to the listener. The present study focused on young adults' use of kinship terms for their parents to investigate whether their use of kinship terms reflects their perception of their parenting. The participants were 329 Japanese college students, who answered a questionnaire about their forms of address for their parents, perceived parental emotional accessibility, and perceived parental control. They also reported their satisfaction with their parent–child relationships and the frequency of parent–child communication. The results suggest that young adults who use kinship terms for their parents perceive their parents to be more emotionally accessible and communicate with their parents more than those who do not. Young adults who use kinship terms for their father are also more satisfied with their father–child relationships than those who do not. Young adults' use of kinship terms might signal not only their deference to their parents, but also their acceptance of their parent–child relationships.

Reference and Response

A standard view of reference holds that a speaker's use of a name refers to a certain thing in virtue of the speaker's associating a condition with that use that singles the referent out. This view has been criticized by Saul Kripke as empirically inadequate. Recently, however, it has been argued that a version of the standard view, a response-based theory of reference, survives the charge of empirical inadequacy by allowing that associated conditions may be largely or even entirely implicit. This paper argues that response-based theories of reference are prey to a variant of the empirical inadequacy objection, because they are ill-suited to accommodate the successful use of proper names by pre-school children. Further, I argue that there is reason to believe that normal adults are, by and large, no different from children with respect to how the referents of their names are determined. I conclude that speakers typically refer positionally: the referent of a use of a proper name is typically determined by aspects of the speaker's position, rather than by associated conditions present, however implicitly, in her psychology.

“Categorizing the Categorizer”: The Management of Racial Common Sense in Interaction

In this paper, I consider one mechanism by which racial categories, racial “common sense,” and thus the social organization of race itself, are reproduced in interaction. I approach these issues by using an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to analyze a range of practices employed by participants of a “race-training” workshop. These practices manage the normative accountability involved in referring to the racial categories of others when describing their actions, and thus in using racial common sense in talk-in-interaction. This accountability arises in part because a speaker's use of a racial category to explain someone else's actions may provide a warranted basis for recipients to treat the speaker's own racial category as relevant for understanding and assessing the speaker's actions. I describe three main ways in which speakers can manage this accountability, namely generalizing race, localizing race, and alluding to race. My analysis shows that, even in attempting to resist racial common sense in accounting for their own actions and those of others, speakers orient to race as a normative framework according to which individuals will produce their own actions and interpret those of others, and thus reproduce it as relevant for understanding social action. This research contributes to advancing knowledge in the fields of ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, racial studies, and categorical inequality.

The communicative style of a speaker can affect language comprehension? ERP evidence from the comprehension of irony

An important issue in irony comprehension concerns when and how listeners integrate extra-linguistic and linguistic information to compute the speaker's intended meaning. To assess whether knowledge about the speaker's communicative style impacts the brain response to irony, ERPs were recorded as participants read short passages that ended either with literal or ironic statements made by one of two speakers. The experiment was carried out in two sessions in which each speaker's use of irony was manipulated. In Session 1, 70% of ironic statements were made by the ironic speaker, while the non-ironic speaker expressed 30% of them. For irony by the non-ironic speaker, an increased P600 was observed relative to literal utterances. By contrast, both ironic and literal statements made by the ironic speaker elicited similar P600 amplitudes. In Session 2, conducted 1 day later, both speakers' use of irony was balanced (i.e. 50% ironic, 50% literal). ERPs for Session 2 showed an irony-related P600 for the ironic speaker but not for the non-ironic speaker. Moreover, P200 amplitude was larger for sentences congruent with each speaker's communicative style (i.e. for irony made by the ironic speaker, and for literal statements made by the non-ironic speaker). These findings indicate that pragmatic knowledge about speakers can affect language comprehension 200 ms after the onset of a critical word, as well as neurocognitive processes underlying the later stages of comprehension (500–900 ms post-onset). Thus perceived speakers' characteristics dynamically impact the construction of appropriate interpretations of ironic utterances.

Plato Re-Read Too Late: Citation and Platonism in Apuleius' Apologia

This paper rereads Apuleius'Apologiathrough its Platonic readings. I claim that the recent focus on the ‘literarisation’ of the speech based in the speaker's learned use of literary citations needs to be contextualised within the Apuleian corpus as a whole and that one way of doing this is to emphasise the role of Platonic citation in the speech. I argue that Apuleius' strategy of literary citation as juridical defence in the first half of the speech (4-65) undergoes a process of ‘Platonisation’ that relies upon the direct quotation of Plato's Greek. I show how this ‘Platonisation’ chimes with two related themes in Apuleius' brand of Platonism that is manifest across his multifarious corpus: firstly, the role of the philosopher's biography as a heuristic device for encouraging an induction into philosophy and, secondly, the uniting of Platonic philosophical theory with Apuleius' particular literary (dramatic and rhetorical) concerns. From this basis, I show that in the second half of the speech (66-103), in spite of the absence of literary and Platonic citation, the general ideas of citation and Platonism developed in the first half are still very much at work in the contested place of Apuleius' wife Pudentilla's Greek letter as evidence for both the prosecution and the defence. While the citation of the letter by both sides raises some troubling questions for the role of literary citation in the first half of the speech, it operates as a powerful argument for the dissemination of Apuleius' Platonic message beyond the event of the trial.

When words feel right: How affective expressions of listeners change a speaker's language use

AbstractBased on conversation research and work showing that affective cues help to tune information processing to situational demands, it was hypothesized that affective expressions of listeners would influence how speakers represent communicated information in language. Participants were asked to orally communicate an event presented in a film clip to two other participants. These other participants were actually confederates who either adopted a positive or negative nonverbal expression during the story of the participant. Results show that participants talking to smiling listeners used more interpretive, abstract language, whereas participants talking to frowning listeners stayed with the concrete and descriptive facts. These effects of external affective cues on language abstraction were not mediated by the speaker's mood. Implications for interpersonal conversation are discussed. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

중국어 ‘我？得’의 담화기능

This paper aims to explore discourse functions of Wojuede in Mandarin Chinese and relation between speaker's status and use of Wojuede from the corpus-based approach. This paper consists of five sections: in the first section, the list of corpus and the transcription system are introduced; in the second section, the degree of independence of Wojuede is analyzed from the quantitative approach, the outcomes in this section are contributed to suggest reanalysis of Wojuede; in the third section, founctions of Wojuede are discussed, they, roughly, consist of 1) expressions of speaker's view, 2) reponses to question, 3) self-repair, 4) display of speaker's standpoint; in the fourth section, the relation between host on the program and use of Wojuede is discussed, host of program, especially dealing with the problem of caller, uses Wojuede to accomplish program's purpose; in the last section, the contents in the paper are summarized, and the implicatures of this research are discussed.

Prosodic contextualization of minimal responses to yes/no-questions in aphasic talk-in-interaction: A descriptive single-case study of a Norwegian aphasic speaker

The article explores aspects of the role of prosody as a contextualization cue in aphasic conversation through auditory and acoustic analysis of an aphasic speaker's use of pitch variation in responses to closed yes/no-requests. The results reveal two prosodic realizations of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ contextualizing different kinds of responses: a flat realization with no prolongation and minimal pauses, signalling decisiveness, and a realization with movement in pitch, prolongation and preceding pauses, signalling indecisiveness. The analysis also shows how the aphasic uses a particular realization manipulatively for interactional purposes. The study illustrates the vital role that seemingly unimportant details play in the co-constructive process of creating meaning in interaction. The results indicate an area of competence that seems undisturbed in this speaker.

Speaking as Jeremiah: Henry McNeal Turner's “I Claim the Rights of a Man”

In 1868, recently elected African American legislators faced imminent expulsion from the Georgia state legislature because of race. Speaking last, 34-year-old Bishop Henry McNeal Turner delivered a scathing denunciation of his opponents. His speech, entitled “I Claim the Rights of a Man,” is analyzed as an example of a jeremiad that did not fully use the rhetorical forms typical of the genre. Extending on the work of W. J. Moses (1982) and D. Howard-Pitney (1990), the author argues that Turner used many jeremiadic elements, including the categorical denunciation of the audience for morally abandoning God and the speaker's use of the prophetic voice. Other elements of the jeremiad were strategically omitted, including an explicit identification of the audience as a chosen people and an expression of optimism for a better future. The author concludes that Turner used the jeremiadic form effectively to convey his moral outrage and condemnation, while avoiding those generic elements that ran counter to his rhetorical purpose.

The Development of an Automated Method for Analyzing Communication Rate in Augmentative and Alternative Communication

A significant barrier to evidence-based practice in Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) is the lack of validated performance measures that can be used by speech-language pathologists and rehabilitation engineers to evaluate the communication and device use of AAC consumers. Recently an effort has been made to develop automated data-logging techniques to facilitate the transcription and analysis of the AAC speaker's device use. A major source of error for the automated measurement of communication rate is the presence of excessive Inter-Selection Intervals (ISIs) (i.e., pause times), for which no communicative activity is occurring. The goal of this study was to develop an automated technique to filter out extreme ISIs, while preserving true communication rate performance. AAC data log files were obtained from seven individuals participating in a 1-month field trial of an AAC technology. Two temporal filtering techniques (arbitrary and individual) were compared for their ability to eliminate excessive ISIs. Results indicated that use of an individualized temporal filter was more sensitive to performance variability than use of an arbitrary temporal filter. Further, the individualized temporal filter elevated the participants' communication rate (measured by words per minute) by a factor of 1.8 to 34.5 greater than that of the unfiltered communication rate estimate. In addition, the first AAC communication rate performance estimates taken from the field are presented. Implications for further research and the valid use of automated data logging and analysis are discussed.

Presupposition and Policing in Complex Demonstratives*

The expressions this cat and that glove with a hole are complex demonstratives. In this paper, we defend a thesis about complex demonstratives. The thesis we defend concerns the role of the nominal (e.g., cat and glove with a hole) in a central class of uses. In the utterances at issue, we argue, the nominal F in that F plays a policing role: no proposition is semantically expressed by the utterance, if the object appropriated by the speaker's use of that F fails to be F. We'll call this nominal policing. In characterizing nominal policing, we introduced the concept of an appropriated object. Roughly, a speaker’s use of that F appropriates an object, if the speaker demonstrates that object, where demonstrations can include both publicly observable gestures by the speaker as well as speaker intentions. For example, if a speaker says That car is better than that car, successively pointing at and intending to talk about two cars in plain view, with each use of that car the speaker appropriates a different object. In this case, the object is a car both times. If in place of one of the cars, there was a boat, but the speaker’s intentions and gestures of pointing remained the same, the speaker would appropriate a boat by one of her uses of that car. Nominal policing predicts that the speaker’s utterance in this case would fail to semantically express a proposition. The thesis of nominal policing has been a focal point of debate within the literature on complex demonstratives. It has been defended by David Braun (1994) and Emma Borg (2000), while Richard Larson and Gabriel Segal (1995) have suggested that it is false. Much of this debate has relied upon the view that complex demonstratives, like bare demonstratives, are referring expressions, and paradigms of direct reference at that. If such a view is assumed, then at least part of the semantic contribution of a use of a complex demonstrative is its referent, and the crucial question becomes what, if any,

What a language is good for: Language socialization, language shift, and the persistence of code-specific genres in St. Lucia

In many bilingual and multilingual communities, certain communicative practices are code-specific in that they conventionally require, and are constituted in part through, the speaker's use of a particular code. Code-specific communicative practices, in turn, simultaneously constitute and partake of code-specific genres: normative, relatively stable, often metapragmatically salient types of utterance, or modes of discourse, that conventionally call for use of a particular code. This article suggests that the notions of code specificity and code-specific genre can be useful ones for theorizing the relationship between code and communicative practice in bilingual/multilingual settings, particularly those in which language shift and other contact-induced processes of linguistic and cultural change tend to highlight that relationship. This is demonstrated through an examination of how young children in St. Lucia are socialized to “curse” and otherwise assert themselves by means of a creole language that under most circumstances they are discouraged from using.The fieldwork on which this article is based was supported by the Fulbright Program, the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; immediate post-fieldwork support was provided by the Spencer Foundation. The work time necessary for writing this article was made possible by a Temple University Presidential Research Incentive Summer Fellowship, a Temple University Research/Study Leave, and a Wenner-Gren Foundation Richard Carley Hunt Fellowship. For their comments on a much briefer earlier version (presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association), I thank Bambi Schieffelin, Patricia Baquedano-López, and Leslie Moore. For comments on this version, I am grateful to Jane Hill and two anonymous reviewers. I am solely responsible for any and all shortcomings.

Visible Verbs Become Spoken

Many movements that humans see naturally suggest something other than themselves. This is a legacy from the remotest time. Among animals, movements of prey and predator give each an indication of what may happen next and a basis for choosing their own actions. As species evolved, the movements that could be made and the meanings that could be suggested in those movements became increasingly sophisticated. Among the higher primates, grooming, aggressive and submissive displays, begging, and other movements regulate complex social interactions. Humans also interpret movements; they inform us of what others do, what happens to things, and how a movement maker feels—all this is instinctive. It has been understood for a long time that movements, gestures, among them, have semantic interpretations. The argument of these chapters, however, is that syntactic interpretation has also evolved and is also eminently natural. Humans not only make, see, and interpret movement but also discern patterns in it: "Something dropped," "That one leapt," "She took it." Movements, when they become the primary symbols of a sign language, have a syntactic structure that can represent these patterns and many others that grow out of them. Sounds can alarm, warn, beckon, threaten, and so on; but unaided by convention they cannot represent nounlike or verblike concepts. Powerless to make even this fundamental grammatical distinction, [End Page 152] sounds have no natural, direct way to show concepts linked in the relationship called predication or syntax. Only convention can link sounds to word meanings and sentence meanings. Click for larger view Figure 1 The direction of movement of a sign can be crucial to understanding the meaning of the sign. Primary sign languages are more natural than spoken languages because a visible sign often carries a visual clue to what it signifies. For example, the meaning of "I give" reverses the meaning of "I was given." Gestured, the two meanings are clearly opposite: the former sign moves outward from the signer; "I was given" moves toward the signer (see fig. 1). But when meanings like these are spoken in English, one must know the language to understand the crucial difference between them. To a speaker or reader of English, the auxiliary was signals the difference. Using was reverses the direction of the giving, but neither the vocal sounds that compose was nor the word itself refer to the direction of transitivity. In a sign language, however, what is given goes from the giver to the receiver; no rule is needed until language becomes spoken. Humans possess an innate, clear understanding, gained early in life, that movement (of anything) toward self differs from movement away from self. Infants acquire this understanding when activity around them and their own hands and eyes and brain circuitry bring [End Page 153] it into their ken. Later, of course, well beyond the period of infancy, they learn that a speaker's use of active or passive voice signals this basic reversal of direction, which was clear to them previously. Speakers of languages have had to come up with various devices to indicate the difference between giving and being given and the whole active/passive distinction. Signers simply make opposed movements to signal the reversal of direction. This relationship of language sign to meaning is not derived from abstract rules. We first understood the active/passive meaning difference by seeing, moving, feeling—by physical experience cognized. Observing the direction of physical actions is so simple and obvious that one may wonder why spoken languages need complex active—passive rules; but the explanation is obvious: sounds that voices make can no more directly indicate the difference between give and receive than that between to and from. As the previous chapter revealed, alternate sign languages used by hearing people may differ from primary sign languages used by those who are deaf, but whether the difference is deep-seated or only one of degree has yet to he determined. If an alternate sign language fully represents a spoken language, it is just as correct to...

System and method for personalizing electronic mail messages by rendering the messages in the voice of a predetermined speaker

Electronic messages are personalized by rendering the messages to recipients in the voice of a predetermined human speaker. This is accomplished by associating with the message payload a set of basis vectors comprising speech parameters from the predetermined human speaker for use in speech synthesis.

Speaker for use in confined spaces

The invention provides a speaker having a number of features that cooperate to provide a small speaker 10 having a high sound pressure level output capability (volume), a wide frequency range, in particular from below 200 Hz to 20,000 Hz, low distortion, and that is magnetically shielded. The speaker 10 is suitable for mounting in, for example, a television where spaces are confined and stray magnetic fields are undesirable, yet high output is desirable and a wide frequency range is desirable to avoid the need for separate middle frequency (midrange) and high frequency (tweeter) speakers.

Multiplicity of self in public discourse: the use of personal references in two radio sports shows

This paper examines cultural differences manifested in and constructed by linguistic practices in public discourse in two sports radio shows in the US and China. The study suggests that the use of personal reference in the two sports radio broadcasts manifests a culturally constructed multiplicity of self. We found that in the English data, the use of personal references represents a predominance of direct consciousness of self [Chafe, W., 1994. Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: the Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.]. In contrast, the Chinese speakers’ use of personal references is implicit and circumferential. By focusing on the Chinese speakers’ use of ziji ‘self’, a frequently used personal pronoun in Chinese for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person referents, with emphatic and empathetic overtones, the study reveals that personal opinions in the Chinese data were facilitated partly through the speaker's use of this pronoun oriented toward micro level discourse contexts. The paper further illustrates that in the Chinese data, personal opinions about other people and controversial issues were expressed through a mediation of the speakers’ displaced consciousness (Chafe, 1994), i.e., in expressing opinions by appealing to collective public opinions. This feature differs from the English data where the interlocutors primarily refer to each other in constructing personal opinions in either negative or positive contexts. By comparing the usages and the functions of the personal references in Mandarin Chinese and in American English, we hope to demonstrate that the concept of “self” has multiple manifestations in various cultures, which should be understood within the specific cultural contexts of their occurrences.