Speech Register Research Articles

Psycholinguistic Peculiarities of the Development of Communicative Competence of Teachers of Secondary Schools

The purpose of the article is to analyze psycholinguistic peculiarities of the development of communicative competence in the structure of social intelligence of teachers and directors of secondary schools in contemporary Ukrainian society.
 Methods of the Research. The following theoretical methods of the research were used to solve the tasks formulated in the article: a categorical method, structural and functional methods, the methods of the analysis, systematization, modeling, generalization. Also we used empirical methods – the methods of observation, conversation, testing with the aim to study the structure of communicative competence and social intelligence of teachers; psychological and pedagogical experiment in a form of the research of the development of the structure of communicative competence and social intelligence of teachers.
 The results of the Research. In the content of communicative competence of teachers we can emphasize the ability to optimize interpersonal relationships in the group; social sensitivity; a set of communicative skills, behavior patterns and communication techniques; a communicative potential; the interpretative competence. Teachers with a low level of communication competence have characterized by communicative failures caused by a violation of their orientation onto the process of communication: non-motivated change of speech strategies, mental orientations and the register of speech; failure by the speaker communicate postulates; neglecting by the speaker the linguistic means, which involve the maxim of the tact; unsuccessful choice by the speaker the tone and the register of communication. Scripts of role deixis, explicit and implicit pragmatic constituents in the structure of teacher’s communicative competence were formulated, their content was revealed.
 Conclusions. Psycholinguistic peculiarities of the development of communicative competence of the teachers and the directors of schools were established: the composite assessment of the teacher’s communicative competence positively correlates with social intelligence, reflexive and empathic personal abilities; communicative competence of the teacher depends on the actualization of scripts of role deixis, explicit and implicit pragmatic constituents in its structure, etc.

Infants' expectations about the recipients of infant-directed and adult-directed speech

Across cultures, adults produce infant-directed speech (IDS) when addressing infants. We explored whether infants expect IDS to be directed at infants and adult-directed speech (ADS) to adults. Infants from Spain and Turkey (12–15 months) watched animated videos with geometric figures, where one adult figure talked to an infant or another adult figure, while they were gazing at each other (Experiments 1 and 2). In some events, the adult figure addressed the infant figure with IDS, or the other adult figure with ADS (congruent); and in others, the same adult figure addressed the other adult figure with IDS or the infant figure with ADS (incongruent). Both groups of infants showed greater looking at incongruent than congruent events. This preference disappeared when the two figures gazed away from each other (Experiment 3). Thus, by 12 months of age, infants have nuanced expectations that different speech registers such as IDS and ADS are appropriate for addressing different recipients in third-party communicative contexts.

The Appealing Qur'an: On the Rhetorical Strategy of Vocatives and Interpellation in the Qur'an

Muslim subjectivity is created and shaped by means of certain linguistic-rhetorical traits and techniques prevalent in the Qur'an. This hypothesis implies that rhetorical choices and strategies were crucial for the emergence and gestalt of the Qur'anic discourse, it oratorical Sitz im Leben. In terms of genre and speech register, Qur'anic discourse presents itself as an extrovert soliloquy: self-sufficient and introvert on one hand and extrovert and audience-orientated on the other. The present article focuses on the latter, that is, the pragmatic and functionalistic nature of Qur'anic rhetoric. Furthermore, it argues for the analytical application of Roman Jakobson's notion of language functions, especially one particular language function. This is the so-called conative or appellative language function, which I regard as a particularly salient Qur'anic one. Central here are linguistic-rhetorical features such as direct speech, imperatives, and vocatives. Moreover, I maintain that the Qur'an's appellative language must be coupled with the critical notion of interpellation, as provided by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918–1990). By means of regular interpallative addresses, such as the yā-ayyuhā vocatives, the Qur'an creates and shape an efficacious Muslim subjectivity: the subject, whether an individual person or a collective group, instantly and intuitively feels recognised and apprehended as a privileged addressee. As a result of this very recognition and apprehension, the subject in the same instant recognises itself as subordinate to a powerful divine voice. Seized by the Qur'anic address, a basic Muslim subjectivity—with a certain vision of the ultimate conditions of existence—is constituted. In other words, the appellative rhetoric is crucial to the appeal of the Qur'an: the appellative Qur'an is an appealing Qur'an.

Existential Sentences as a Characteristic Syntactic Feature of I. A. Bunin’s Poetic Texts

In this article, existential sentences are examined as a syntactic dominant of I. A. Bunin’s lyrical poetry. The interest in the originality of the syntax of Nobel laureate’s literary texts is due to the lack of research on this issue, linguists’ focus on the aesthetic salience of the vocabulary, its expressive properties and combination potential, as well as stylistic figures and tropes. Meanwhile, it is the writer’s selection of specific syntactic structures for the implementation of the idea, the representation of key ideas and concepts that reflect his personality and the peculiarities of his perception of the surrounding world. The author refers to Bunin’s poems from 1886–1917 and 1918–1953 published in Bunin’s collected works in 9 volumes. In the writer’s poetic oeuvre, existential sentences are regularly used. Despite the traditional structure that underlies them and is represented by three meanings (‘the object of being’, ‘being’, and ‘area of being’), the richness of the lexical content of each of the main components stands out. As a result, existential sentences become a universal form used to represent completely different situations in the author’s individual worldview: the existence of natural objects in space, meteorological phenomena, events, time periods, artifacts, etc.; physical states of the surrounding world; psychological states of the subject. Acting as a semantic core of a poetic text, existential sentences do not have a fixed place in it, and are used as a lyrical beginning, an interposed element, or an ending in its structure. In each position, their use is conceptually significant. It is established that the peculiarity of existential sentences in Bunin’s lyrical poetry is their syntactic unconditionality (attachment to three registers of speech, i.e. reproductive, informative, and generative) and polyfunctionality (performing the pictorial, characterising and concluding, and generalising functions).

Embodying kin-based respect in speech, sign, and gesture

AbstractIn Australian Indigenous societies the means for demonstrating kinship-based respect are rich and varied, and mastery of their ideological and contextual dimensions is highly valued and an indication of communicative expertise. Special speech registers, sometimes referred to as ‘mother-in-law’, ‘brother-in-law’, or ‘avoidance’ languages, are one aspect of this complexity. Another dimension of respect is afforded by Australian Indigenous sign languages, used in contexts where speech itself is disallowed as well as in everyday interactions where signing is practical and useful. What is lacking from the majority of accounts of these special semiotic repertoires is an investigation of the ways that speech and communicative actions, such as sign or gesture, may work together in such contexts. Also neglected is the possibility that the articulation of signs and gestures may be modified to indicate a respectful stance towards avoided kin. Drawing on both archival sources and recent fieldwork, this paper delineates some of the articulatory dimensions of signs and gestures used in this domain.

Style of religious texts as a potential hindrance in interpreter training

According to the thematic progression model of Janikowski (2011) religious texts can be used at the early stages of interpreter training. The reservations against such placement of allegedly stylistically sophisticated texts are scrutinised in the following paper by means of (1) developing a set of features of spoken religious discourse and (2) empirically testing their frequency in a convenience corpus. The results do show an unexpectedly high level of metaphorical saturation of spoken religious texts (1.4 per minute of speech), but they also show that only 8% of these metaphors were unconventional and that speakers sometimes employed special means of facilitating metaphor processing. Additionally, the appearance of other markers traditionally recognised as elements of religious style (intertextual allusions, markers of higher register and other figures of speech) was only marginal. Thus, the results support the use of religious texts as the second stage in thematic development, however, with a set of recommendations.

Song and infant-directed speech facilitate word learning.

Two separate lines of research have examined the influence of song and infant-directed speech (IDS-a speech register that includes some melodic features) on language learning, suggesting that the use of musical attributes in speech input can enhance language learning. However, the benefits of these two types of stimuli have never been directly compared. In this investigation, we compared the effects of song and IDS for immediate word learning and long-term memory of the learned words. This study examines whether the highly musical stimuli (i.e., song) would facilitate language learning more than the less musical stimuli (i.e., IDS). English-speaking adults were administered a word learning task, with Mandarin Chinese words presented in adult-directed speech (ADS), IDS, or song. Participants' word learning performance was assessed immediately after the word learning task (immediate word learning) and then 1 day later (long-term memory). Results showed that both song and IDS facilitated immediate word learning and long-term memory of the words; however, this facilitative effect did not differ between IDS and song, suggesting that the relationship between the degree of musicality and language learning performance is not linear. In addition, song and IDS were found to facilitate the word association process (mapping a label to its referent) rather than the word recognition process. Finally, participants' confidence in their answers might not differ among ADS, IDS, and sung words.

Newborn infants differently process adult directed and infant directed speech

Infant directed speech (IDS) may serve important functions in language acquisition and in adult-infant communication. The processing of IDS evolves during the first years of life. In order to serve as an effective tool of language acquisition, already very young infants should be able to distinguish IDS from adult directed speech (ADS). We tested whether the ability to discriminate these two speech registers is functional in neonates, by recording EEG from 98 newborn infants in response to Hungarian words naturally spoken in the IDS and the ADS register. Words presented in the ADS register elicited a centro-parietal slow positivity in the 200–600 ms time window whereas words in IDS register elicited a small frontal negativity in the 700–900 ms time window. We conclude that newborn infants differentiate natural speech sounds based on speech register.

Are similar control processes implemented during single and dual language production? Evidence from switching between speech registers and languages

AbstractTo investigate whether similar control processes are used during single and dual language production, we compared register switching (formal and informal speech in the same language) vs. language switching (French and English). The results across two experiments showed a positive correlation of overall register- and language-switch costs and similar formal French switch costs across the two switching tasks. However, whereas increasing the cue-to-stimulus interval resulted in a reduction of language-switch costs, register-switch costs were unaffected by the interval manipulation. This difference in switch-cost pattern indicates that control processes are not entirely identical during single and dual language production.

Do speech registers differ in the predictability of words?

AbstractPrevious research has demonstrated that language use can vary depending on the context of situation. The present paper extends this finding by comparing word predictability differences between 14 speech registers ranging from highly informal conversations to read-aloud books. We trained 14 statistical language models to compute register-specific word predictability and trained a register classifier on the perplexity score vector of the language models. The classifier distinguishes perfectly between samples from all speech registers and this result generalizes to unseen materials. We show that differences in vocabulary and sentence length cannot explain the speech register classifier’s performance. The combined results show that speech registers differ in word predictability.

Effects of hearing loss and amplification device on infants’ perception of infant-directed speech

Caregivers typically speak to their infants in a speech register known as motherese or infant-directed speech (IDS; Fernald and Simon, 1984; Snow, 1977). Infants also prefer to listen to IDS over adult-directed speech (ADS) (Cooper and Aslin, 1990; Fernald, 1985; Singh et al.). Moreover, mothers adjust their IDS to factors such as infant age (e.g., Kitamura and Burnham, 2003; Newman and Hussain, 2006). Another factor that could potentially affect mother-infant interactions is infant hearing loss. Studies have shown that mothers adjust their speech based on infants’ hearing experience (e.g., Bergeson et al., 2006; Kondaurova and Bergeson, 2011; Wieland et al., 2015). Do infants with hearing loss pay attention to IDS? Two recent studies suggest that infants who use hearing aids or cochlear implants demonstrate increased attention to IDS over both ADS and silent trials (Wanget al., 2017; 2018). One feature that might regulate infant attention, namely target word repetition, is correlated with vocabulary skills in later childhood (Wang et al., in preparation). In this talk, we will address infants’ attention to speech and the role IDS serves in both cognitive-social and linguistic development for typically hearing infants and those with hearing loss.

Infant-directed speech register in children with and without hearing loss

Do children with hearing loss use infant-directed speech? The study examined speech characteristics of a 6-year-old child with bilateral cochlear implants and an age-matched child with normal-hearing while interacting with their infant siblings (age 29 and 20 months) and with their mothers. Child-sibling and child-mother interactions were recorded in two conditions. In the “toy” condition, the children explained to their siblings and their mothers how to assemble a toy. In the “book” condition, the children narrated a story using a picture book. Sixty-five vocalizations from each child’s speech sample were extracted in each condition. Mean fundamental frequency, fundamental frequency range, utterance duration, number of syllables per utterance, and speech rate were measured. Both children produced higher fundamental frequency, expanded fundamental frequency range, shorter utterance duration, and slower speech rate in the sibling- compared to mother-directed speech in both the “book” and “toy” conditions. For the mother-directed speech only, the children produced lower fundamental frequency, longer utterance duration and more syllables per utterance in the “book” than the “toy” condition. The results suggest that children with and without hearing loss modify prosodic characteristics of their speech when interacting with a younger sibling but the strength of the modification may be task-dependent.

Characterising maternal pitch contours used during interactions with infants at high and low risk for autism spectrum disorder

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is the speech register used when interacting with infants. Pitch contours are a salient aspect of IDS and facilitate infant language and socio-communicative development. Little research investigates pitch contours within the context of socio-communication or language deficits, such as infants at high-risk (HR) for Autism Spectrum Disorder (autism). The aim of this study was to characterise pitch contours used by mothers when interacting with HR infants compared to mothers interacting with low-risk (LR) infants. 18 mothers and their 12-month-old infant (12m, 6f) participated in 15-minute recorded interactions. Autism risk was assessed via parent and observer-report. Pearson product-moment correlations were performed to determine relationships between maternal pitch contours and autism risk. Increased risk for autism was associated with fewer utterances (r = -0.576, N = 18, p = 0.01) and fewer rising (r = -0.586, N = 18, p = 0.01), sinusoidal (r = -0.636, N = 18, p = 0.005), and flat contours (r = -0.679, N = 18, p = 0.01), and more complex (r = 0.584, N = 18, p = 0.01), rapid (r = 0.526, N = 18, p = 0.03), and u-shaped contours (r = 0.619, N = 18, p = 0.02). These preliminary data suggest that mothers of HR infants use different patterns of pitch contours than LR mothers. Further assessment of IDS used with HR infants is warranted to identify at what stage IDS patterns deviate between groups.

Infant-directed speech facilitates neural encoding of speech during infants’ first year of life

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is the special speech register that parents use when addressing young infants. Compared to adult-directed speech (ADS), it is characterised by positive affect, high pitch and wide pitch range, and acoustically exaggerated speech sounds. These acoustic components of IDS have been proposed to facilitate early language acquisition by attracting infants’ attention to speech, or by providing them with a type of speech input that is easier to perceive and learn, or both. Indeed, infants are more successful in a variety of behavioural language processing tasks when presented with IDS stimuli, but it is unclear whether these effects are due to the linguistic function of IDS or solely to its attention-grabbing qualities. I will present three studies that address this question by directly measuring infants’ neurophysiological responses to IDS and ADS. Our findings demonstrate that IDS elicits greater neural activation and more mature neural response patterns compared to ADS in measures of neural entrainment to continuous speech, phonemic discrimination, and semantic processing in 4-to-9-month-old infants. This evidence indicates that beyond capturing infants’ attention to speech, IDShas a privileged status in facilitating neural encoding of speech, which may augment infants’ early speech processing and even later language development.

From Daily Conversation to Public Speech: A Quantitative Analysis of Lexical and Grammatical Characteristics of the Corpus of Spoken Lithuanian

The aim of the paper is to describe a variety of different registers of spoken Lithuanian and to discuss and compare their lexical and grammatical characteristics. Thus, in this article we: (1) characterize different registers and genres of spoken Lithuanian; (2) present a distribution of different parts of speech in the Corpus; (3) discuss the lexical diversity; (4) present the most typical inverted order of words; (5) when possible, compare our results with those obtained in written Lithuanian, Quantitative and statistical methods and a methodology of corpus linguistics were employed for the study. The study was based on the data of the Corpus of Spoken Lithuanian. During the study, all the conversations stored in the corpus were classified into five registers: academic, mass-media, casual, intimate, and consultative. An analysis of the distribution of different parts of speech revealed that the registers of spontaneous speech (namely, the casual, the intimate, and the consultative registers) did not differ among each other. However, significant differences were revealed between spontaneous and prepared speech: nouns and adjectives were more frequent in academic and mass-media discourse (both of which might be characterized as prepared speech), while adverbs, pronouns, and particles were more often used in spontaneous speech. A comparative analysis confirmed that from the perspective of the distribution of parts of speech the academic and the mass-media registers are the most similar to written language, especially to fictional texts. This might be explained by such characteristics of a fictional text as its stylistic flexibility and a presence of conversations among the personages. An analysis of lexical diversity revealed the only difference among the registers: namely, the index of noun lexical diversity distinguished among the registers, while the indices of adjective and verb lexical diversity were rather similar. Independently of the register, the most frequent verbs were sakyti ‘to say’, žinoti ‘to know’, reikėti ‘to need’, norėti ‘to want’, turėti ‘to have’, galėti ‘to be able’, and būti ‘to be’; the most frequent adjectives were didelis ‘big’, įdomus ‘interesting’, naujas ‘new’, mažas ‘small’, svarbus ‘important’, and įvairus ‘various’; and the most frequent nouns were diena ‘a day’, laikas ‘time’, žmogus ‘a man/human’, and metai ‘a year’. An analysis of the inverted word order revealed that in spontaneous speech (especially in the consultative register) the attributes quite often follow the agreement controllers; subordinate clauses precede the head nouns; and the objects are used at the onset of the clauses. However, the inverted word order was also observed in the prepared speech, that is, the academic and the mass-media registers.

Художественная интерпретация концепта винопитие в серии детективных романов Бориса Акунина «Приключения Эраста Фандорина»

The features of the concept representation of wine drinking in the artistic version of Boris Akunin are considered on the example of a series of detective stories “The Adventures of Erast Fandorin”. The work is a continuation of the author’s research in the field of artistic interpretation of Bacchic discourse by various writers. The connection between the creation of a bacchic artistic image and the type of culture (soteriological and eudaimonic) is noted. Among the artistic features of Akunin’s work is a description of the crimes that were committed with “grace and taste”. The author of the article claims that this feature affects the choice of means of creating a bacchic picture of the world in the work. It is noted that the introduction of elements of the wine drinking situation is used by Akunin as a means of reconstructing the background “picture” that performs a descriptive function, and as a plot-modeling component. In the Akunin model of a city street of the XIX century, the “classical” composition of the characters includes not only “a janitor”, “a tradeswoman”, “a cabman”, etc., but also a “drunken cornball”. A “character model” is described, including a set of his characteristics, which can be called a “card index” of his weaknesses and habits. Among the elements of this “card index” the presence of a tendency to wine drinking, which is a character's vulnerability, is noted. The character traits include such features as appearance (face, eyes, weight), olfactory characteristics (smell as a marker of social status or national identity), speech (voice, its timbre, register and manners), wine variety as a business card of the hero, his weaknesses and habits.

Ritual Speech Register, Speaking Conventions, and Social Order in the Russian North

Ritual Speech Register, Speaking Conventions, and Social Order in the Russian North

Rehearsed Language of Psychoanalysis

AbstractTaking up Bion's idea of a continuum between the psychotic and non‐psychotic parts of the mind, this paper looks at clinical moments where the primitive part – psychotic and ‘autistic‐contiguous’ – mimes language and takes over the analytic field. The patients discussed seem to intuit the analyst's blind spots and a pseudo‐language takes over as primitive parts of the patient collude with those of the analyst. The three patients discussed here use registers of speech which vary from over‐abundant to quicksilver and dried. However, it is not as much a communicative use as it is evacuative and adhesive. Verbal language offers familiar moulds in terms of unfree associations, pre‐existing narrative structures, syntax, figures of speech (symbols, metaphors, paradoxes) and common psychoanalytic tropes (dreams, primal scenes). Primitive parts of the mind nestle in these moulds rather than disturb them. It is only through examining the countertransference and abjuring collusions that the analyst may be able to contact the terrifying or enclosed parts in the field. ‘Death’, for instance, represents the limits of language and as it is unpacked, it comes to acquire a range of meanings which allow the recovery of thinking. I have tried to demonstrate the experience of verbal language as a seductive screen that analyst and analysand collaboratively create to make bearable the incomprehensibility of the encounter. In doing this what emerges is a ‘thick description’ that helped and reflects on different kinds of collusion. The paper tries to capture the experience of collusion as well as a return from it.

What Do North American Babies Hear? A large-scale cross-corpus analysis.

A range of demographic variables influences how much speech young children hear. However, because studies have used vastly different sampling methods, quantitative comparison of interlocking demographic effects has been nearly impossible, across or within studies. We harnessed a unique collection of existing naturalistic, day-long recordings from 61 homes across four North American cities to examine language input as a function of age, gender, and maternal education. We analyzed adult speech heard by 3- to 20-month-olds who wore audio recorders for an entire day. We annotated speaker gender and speech register (child-directed or adult-directed) for 10,861 utterances from female and male adults in these recordings. Examining age, gender, and maternal education collectively in this ecologically valid dataset, we find several key results. First, the speaker gender imbalance in the input is striking: children heard 2-3× more speech from females than males. Second, children in higher-maternal education homes heard more child-directed speech than those in lower-maternal education homes. Finally, our analyses revealed a previously unreported effect: the proportion of child-directed speech in the input increases with age, due to a decrease in adult-directed speech with age. This large-scale analysis is an important step forward in collectively examining demographic variables that influence early development, made possible by pooled, comparable, day-long recordings of children's language environments. The audio recordings, annotations, and annotation software are readily available for reuse and reanalysis by other researchers.

Infant-directed speech facilitates seven-month-old infants\u2019 cortical tracking of speech

This study assessed cortical tracking of temporal information in incoming natural speech in seven-month-old infants. Cortical tracking refers to the process by which neural activity follows the dynamic patterns of the speech input. In adults, it has been shown to involve attentional mechanisms and to facilitate effective speech encoding. However, in infants, cortical tracking or its effects on speech processing have not been investigated. This study measured cortical tracking of speech in infants and, given the involvement of attentional mechanisms in this process, cortical tracking of both infant-directed speech (IDS), which is highly attractive to infants, and the less captivating adult-directed speech (ADS), were compared. IDS is the speech register parents use when addressing young infants. In comparison to ADS, it is characterised by several acoustic qualities that capture infants’ attention to linguistic input and assist language learning. Seven-month-old infants’ cortical responses were recorded via electroencephalography as they listened to IDS or ADS recordings. Results showed stronger low-frequency cortical tracking of the speech envelope in IDS than in ADS. This suggests that IDS has a privileged status in facilitating successful cortical tracking of incoming speech which may, in turn, augment infants’ early speech processing and even later language development.