Spontaneous Narratives Research Articles

A grammar of Papuan Malay

This book presents an in-depth linguistic description of one Papuan Malay variety, based on fifteen hours of recordings of spontaneous narratives and conversations between Papuan Malay speakers. ‘Papuan Malay’ refers to the easternmost varieties of Malay (Austronesian). They are spoken in the coastal areas of West Papua, the western part of the island of New Guinea. The variety described here is spoken along West Papua’s northeast coast. After a general introduction to the language, its setting and its history, this grammar discusses the following topics, building up from smaller grammatical constituents to larger ones: phonology, word formation, noun and prepositional phrases, verbal and nonverbal clauses, non-declarative clauses, and conjunctions and constituent combining. Of special interest to linguists, typologists and Malay specialists are the following in-depth analyses and descriptions: affixation and its productivity across domains of language choice, reduplication and its gesamtbedeutung, personal pronouns and their adnominal uses, demonstratives and locatives and their extended uses, and adnominal possessive relations and their non-canonical uses. This study provides a point of comparison for further studies in other (Papuan) Malay varieties and a starting point for Papuan Malay language development efforts.

Linguistic characteristics in a non-trauma-related narrative task are associated with PTSD diagnosis and symptom severity.

Linguistic characteristics of trauma narratives have been linked to the development and severity of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, it remains unclear if linguistic markers of PTSD exist beyond the scope of trauma narratives. This study used ambiguous visual prompts to elicit spontaneous narratives from trauma-exposed individuals with (n = 23) and without PTSD (n = 30). Individuals with PTSD used more singular pronouns and death-related words, and fewer plural pronouns. Within the PTSD group, increased severity of reexperiencing symptoms was associated with greater use of singular pronouns and lower use of cognitive words; increased severity of avoidance symptoms was associated with lower use of death words; and increased severity of hyperarousal symptoms was associated with less frequent use of anxiety words. Together, these linguistic variables accounted for 53% of the variance in total PTSD symptom severity. These findings are consistent with previous research suggesting that language use is a strong predictor of PTSD psychopathology, and extend the evidence to include the linguistic characteristics of non-trauma-related narratives.

Vowel variability in elicited versus spontaneous speech: Evidence from Mixtec

This study investigates the influence of speech style, duration, contextual factors, and sex on vowel dispersion and variability in Yoloxóchitl Mixtec, an endangered language spoken in Mexico. Oral vowels were examined from recordings of elicited citation words and spontaneous narrative speech matched across seven speakers. Results show spontaneous speech to contain shorter vowel durations and stronger effects of contextual assimilation than elicited speech. The vowel space is less disperse and there is greater intra-vowel variability in spontaneous speech than in elicited speech. Furthermore, male speakers show smaller differences in vowel dispersion and duration across styles than female speakers do. These phonetic differences across speech styles are not entirely reducible to durational differences; rather, speakers also seem to adjust their articulatory/acoustic precision in accordance with style. Despite the stylistic differences, we find robust acoustic differences between vowels in spontaneous speech, maintaining the overall vowel space pattern. While style and durational changes produce noticeable differences in vowel acoustics, one can closely approximate the phonetics of a vowel system of an endangered language from narrative speech. Elicited speech is likelier to give the most extreme formants used by the language than is spontaneous speech, but the usefulness of phonetic data from spontaneous speech has still been demonstrated.

Continuous theta burst stimulation of angular gyrus reduces subjective recollection.

The contribution of lateral parietal regions such as the angular gyrus to human episodic memory has been the subject of much debate following widespread observations of left parietal activity in healthy volunteers during functional neuroimaging studies of memory retrieval. Patients with lateral parietal lesions are not amnesic, but recent evidence indicates that their memory abilities may not be entirely preserved. Whereas recollection appears intact when objective measures such as source accuracy are used, patients often exhibit reduced subjective confidence in their accurate recollections. When asked to recall autobiographical memories, they may produce spontaneous narratives that lack richness and specificity, but can remember specific details when prompted. Two distinct theoretical accounts have been proposed to explain these results: that the patients have a deficit in the bottom-up capturing of attention by retrieval output, or that they have an impairment in the subjective experience of recollection. The present study aimed to differentiate between these accounts using continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) in healthy participants to disrupt function of specific left parietal subregions, including angular gyrus. Inconsistent with predictions of the attentional theory, angular gyrus cTBS did not result in greater impairment of free recall than cued recall. Supporting predictions of the subjective recollection account, temporary disruption of angular gyrus was associated with highly accurate source recollection accuracy but a selective reduction in participants’ rated source confidence. The findings are consistent with a role for angular gyrus in the integration of memory features into a conscious representation that enables the subjective experience of remembering.

Understanding Phatic Aspects of Narrative when Designing Assistive and Augmentative Communication Interfaces

Users of Assistive and Augmentative Communications (AAC) systems sometimes have difficulty engaging in the quick and varied banter demanded of many social situations, or contributing to social conversations with their own previously developed narratives, opinions, experiences, or jokes. This chapter presents tools and approaches that have been developed to remedy these challenges. These include special interfaces that rely on “phatic” vocabularies or retrieve previously saved narratives that are used phatically. A phatic approach uses language to convey social participation through gesture, affirmation, or emotive support as much as or more than to convey wants, needs, or spontaneous and novel narrative. This chapter does not propose replacing standard AAC vocabularies, but instead suggests how a supplementary phatic approach can significantly enhance a user's participation in social interactions.

The Function and Content of Relative Clauses in Spontaneous Oral Narratives

Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1979), pp. 539-551

Testing a Structural Equation Model of Language-based Cognitive Fitness

Development of language is taken for granted by most. Problems with language development can result in stress for the individual and family; there is a challenge in that the contemporary education system assumes children have appropriate skills when they begin school. The purpose of the study is to test a theoretical model oflanguage readiness, noted as language-based cognitive fitness, which includes measures associated with structural concepts of language involving receptive language, expressive language, spontaneous narrative speech, and writing fluency. The sample includes students from a private school who receive an extensive battery of tests at admission and annually thereafter. Scores from a variety of cognitive measures will be used in a structural equation modeling framework to test the model. Results demonstrate language-based cognitive fitness to be an interplay of verbal reasoning abilities, visual synthesis, and active analysis broadly representing receptive language, expressive language, spontaneous narrative expression, and writing fluency but not in the proposed hierarchical structure. The model was able to predict student achievement for students of challenged and average cognitive profiles. Implications for positive social change include an improved understanding of the language structures responsible for language deficits and how these relate to overall cognitive fitness; interventions can be provided to help children more quickly make up language deficits.

Paroles reprises, erreur et fluence dans les narrations orales spontanées des apprenants de français langue étrangère

This paper reports a study that investigated self-corrections in spontaneous oral narratives. Seventeen adults students of French as a foreign language were asked to imagine the story from a cartoon and a short silent film. Their performances were recorded and then transcribed. The corpus obtained contains 17255 words. The aim of the study is to provide surface descriptions and classifications of self-corrections and to determine their relationships to linguistic error. Four major types of self-corrections were distinguished: morphological, syntactic, semantic and lexical. The analysis shows that self-corrections are not only a mecanism used to repair errors but also a strategy used by the learners to buy time for lexical search and to promote greater oral fluency. Different cases of improved fluency via self-corrections are discussed, where prefabricated language also seems to play a strategic role.

Schizophrenia and the Sense of Self

Sense of self (SOS)--understood as the foundation upon which individuals experience their daily lives--has been increasingly investigated in schizophrenia. A disrupted SOS is thought to represent a platform for the experience of psychiatric symptoms, social cognitive deficits, and other abnormalities of consciousness. Few studies, however, have investigated the specificity of disrupted SOS to schizophrenia. The primary objective of the present study was to test the hypothesis that SOS is deficient in schizophrenia patients compared to both nonpsychiatric controls and patients with psychotic bipolar disorder. Using select scales from the Assessment of Self Descriptions, the present study assessed SOS from spontaneous narratives provided by schizophrenia patients (N = 50), bipolar patients with psychotic features (N = 17), and nonpsychiatric controls (N = 24). Our findings indicate that facets of SOS-in particular, certain aspects of agency and relatedness to others-are deficient in schizophrenia compared to nonpsychiatric controls and bipolar patients with psychotic features, even when overall level of functioning and psychiatric symptoms are accounted for. Implications of these results are discussed.

Toward a quantitative account of pitch distribution in spontaneous narrative: Method and validation

Pitch is well-known both to animate human discourse and to convey meaning in communication. The study of the statistical population distributions of pitch in discourse will undoubtedly benefit from methodological improvements. The current investigation examines a method that parameterizes pitch in discourse as musical pitch interval H measured in units of cents and that disaggregates the sequence of peak word-pitches using tools employed in time-series analysis and digital signal processing. The investigators test the proposed methodology by its application to distributions in pitch interval of the peak word-pitch (collectively called the discourse gamut) that occur in simulated and actual spontaneous emotive narratives obtained from 17 middle-aged African-American adults. The analysis, in rigorous tests, not only faithfully reproduced simulated distributions imbedded in realistic time series that drift and include pitch breaks, but the protocol also reveals that the empirical distributions exhibit a common hidden structure when normalized to a slowly varying mode (called the gamut root) of their respective probability density functions. Quantitative differences between narratives reveal the speakers' relative propensity for the use of pitch levels corresponding to elevated degrees of a discourse gamut (the "e-la") superimposed upon a continuum that conforms systematically to an asymmetric Laplace distribution.

Quotatives down under

The English quotative system (featuring forms such as say, think, zero, go, all and be like used in direct speech reproduction and thought) has been the subject of vigorous, in-depth sociolinguistic investigation, particularly in the past two decades. However, with the notable exception of Winter’s (2002) study of quotative be like in the speech of Melbourne adolescents, the Australian English quotative system remains virtually uncharted. I address this gap in the literature by offering a quantitative sociolinguistic analysis of the quotative system of Perth English, investigating to what extent linguistic (grammatical person, content of quote and tense) and social (age and sex) variables are implicated in the use of be like. My results stem from 32.5 hours (325 096 words) of spontaneous narratives of personal experience recorded with 47 speakers in Perth in 2011 and evince an overwhelming increase in the use of be like particularly amongst the youngest speakers — as compared to Winter’s (2002) findings for Melbourne in the late 1990s. Multivariate analysis using Goldvarb X (Sankoff, Tagliamonte and Smith 2005) indicates that — although some constraints like the favouring effect of first person subjects behave similarly across the generations and are in line with other Englishes — Australian be like is subject to different constraints across generations of young speakers. Pre-adolescent and adolescent girls are active agents of language change by upping be like’s frequency and its use with the historical present in narratives. Young adults are steady users of be like in historical present contexts but the significant effect of sex has reversed: it is young male adults — rather than women — who favour be like in this cohort. The findings are in line with trends noted in the literature on English quotation elsewhere and point once again to the irrevocable link between system-internal forces and social factors as speakers move through life.

A study on speech rate as a prosodic feature in spontaneous narrative

Speech rate is examined in this paper as a prosodic feature employed in the signaling of spontaneous narrative structure. Assuming that narratives have a structural system in itself, and that interactants mark their moves and their more global activities in order to make them unambiguous (JEFFERSON, 1978; SACKS, 1972), the present paper examines speech rate phenomena, from an acoustic-experimental approach, in 17 spontaneous narratives, using one of the most influential models for narrative analysis - the Labovian Evaluative Model (LABOV, 1972) - as framework for the analysis. The prosodic variable under investigation is analyzed on two different levels: at specific points in the narratives corresponding to section boundaries (local level), and within different sections in the narratives as a whole (global level). The results indicate that speech rate operates exclusively on the global level, by generating a cyclical pattern of varying rates corresponding to the individual, linear sections that make up narrative texts. Speech rate does not characterize narrative sections and is not manipulated on the local level in order to mark narrative boundaries.

The Creative Cycle Processes Model of Spontaneous Imagery Narratives Applied to the Ayahuasca Shamanic Journey

AbstractAyahuasca is an Amazonian psychoactive shamanic brew that often elicits spontaneous, intense, and meaningful imagery narratives related to psychological and physical healing, problem solving, knowledge acquisition, community cohesion, creativity, and spiritual development. My EEG and phenomenology ayahuasca research found it caused the greatest changes in EEG beta coherence from 25 to 30 cycles per second compared to a resting state before ayahuasca ingestion. Enhanced beta coherence indexes significantly greater information exchange between cortical regions and is congruent with the reported enhanced richness, complexity, and profundity of ayahuasca experiences. I developed the creative cycle processes model that identifies in ayahuasca reports distinct experiential change processes and describes how these processes, neuroscience, psychotherapy, mythological, and other transdisciplinary evidence can be coherently integrated to explain ayahuasca benefits. The model suggests three change process stages together underlie one emergent dynamic creative cycle process. The sequential stages are Form dismantling and healing processes, form creation processes, where novel forms spontaneously combine, and form expression processes, where emergent experiences are embodied. The model suggests that these three stages repeat cyclically in human development in an ongoing process of dismantling and generation producing more creative experiences and expressive forms.

Exploring a corpus-based approach for detecting language impairment in monolingual English-speaking children

This paper explores the use of an automated method for analyzing narratives of monolingual English speaking children to accurately predict the presence or absence of a language impairment. The goal is to exploit corpus-based approaches inspired by the fields of natural language processing and machine learning. We extract a large variety of features from language samples and use them to train language models and well known machine learning algorithms as the underlying predictors. The methods are evaluated on two different datasets and three language tasks. One dataset contains samples of two spontaneous narrative tasks performed by 118 children with an average age of 13 years and a second dataset contains play sessions from over 600 younger children with an average age of 6 years. We compare results against a cut off baseline method and show that our results are far superior, reaching F-measures of over 85% in two of the three language tasks, and 48% in the third one. The different experiments we present here show that corpus based approaches can yield good prediction results in the problem of language impairment detection. These findings warrant further exploration of natural language processing techniques in the field of communication disorders. Moreover, the proposed framework can be easily adapted to analyze samples in languages other than English since most of the features are language independent or can be customized with little effort.

Information Structure and the Expression of Givenness in Buglere (Chibchan)

This paper provides an account of the expression of information structure in general, as well as of the information-structure category of givenness in particular, in Buglere, a Chibchan language of Costa Rica and Panama. Previous accounts of the existing morphosyntactic strategies to encode information-structure categories in Buglere are examined on the basis of a typical Buglere narrative, Additionally, the information-structure category of givenness is briefly inspected by means of two production experiments; the idea is to ascertain whether the tendencies found in natural speech remain in controlled, artificial environments. The analysis of the spontaneous narrative tends to confirm previous accounts of the information-structure patterns in Buglere, while the results of the experiments only partially confirm previous accounts. The emerging discrepancies are explained as being caused by the environment of the experiments, which speakers might have found slightly unnatural.

“How Come I Fell Pregnant?”: Young Mothers' Narratives of Conception

ABSTRACT The spontaneous narratives that a small group of English young mothers gave of their unintended conceptions are my focus here. Young mothers' accounts were gathered for research on sex and relationship education (Alldred and David 2007). They had been asked their views on school sex education, on early childbearing and about the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, an outgoing and much criticised UK policy for “social inclusion” (see Kidger 2004, Harris 2005; Alldred and David 2007; Duncan et ah, 2010). For this analysis, however, the interview transcripts have been revisited to explore narratives that were not invited. The fact that nine of the ten young mothers gave accounts of how they came to be pregnant is interpreted as indicating their desire to explain themselves or their perception that they were expected to account for their situation. The dominant cultural narratives and stereotypes that their accounts seek to counter are identified. It is argued that this perceived need to account for their pregnancy offers an insight into the UK's harsh cultural politics, but also highlights ethical issues for research with teenage mothers internationally as well as in the UK context.

Narrativas orais de crianças com desenvolvimento típico de linguagem

Development of oral narrative. To verify narrative and pause duration, number of words and interlocutor's interventions in the oral narratives of children with typical development. This study involved 31 subjects divided into four groups according to age: GI (3:1 to 4:0 years), GII (4:1 to 5:0 years), GIII (5:1 to 6:0 years) and GIV (6:1 to 7:0 years). Samples of spontaneous narrative and narrative based on a book without words were video recorded, transcribed and statistically analyzed using the Fisher's exact test (nonparametric) and the linear regression model with mixed effects. The results of pause duration, narrative duration and number of words were significantly higher for the narrative samples produced using a book than those obtained in the spontaneous narratives (p-value < 0.01). Regarding the number of interventions, a correlation (p-value = 0.03) between age and number of interventions was observed for the book context. It was observed that the number of interventions decrease with age. Children presented longer narratives in the book context. However, no significant differences were observed between the age groups. The results of the study also suggest that the interlocutor's interventions become less necessary with the aging process.

Validação de itens para uma escala de avaliação da inteligibilidade de fala

speech intelligibility evaluation. to develop and validate items for a speech intelligibility assessment scale based on the speech of individuals with phonological disorder (PD) who present common phonological repair strategies (RS) in the Brazilian Portuguese language (BP), through the testing of its effectiveness in classifying the speech of these subjects. Also to observe the speech intelligibility generated by the use of RS and possible interference of factors such as gender, age, literacy and contact of the judges with children. spontaneous narratives of five children with typical PD and one control subject were recorded in a compact disc (CD) and presented to 103 judges, with normal hearing abilities, with ages ranging from 18 to 39 years and with elementary, high-school and undergraduate backgrounds. results indicate the statistical validity of the scale and that the type of RS if fundamental for speech intelligibility. There was no statistical interference of the investigated variables of gender, age, literacy and contact with children in the performed judgments. the scale items were validated and demonstrated efficacy in the assessment of speech intelligibility of the studied cases.

Children’s Narrating as a Way of Learning About Other People’s Beliefs in Interaction with Teachers

As a genre of talk, narratives represent important building blocks in children’s learning in many fields. The purpose of the study presented in this article is to examine how teachers can encourage children’s learning about people’s beliefs through narrating. Narratives play an important part in children’s learning to understand other people and how they will act according to what they believe, think or know. This study is based on video observations of six children, 3 and 4 years old, and their spontaneous personal narratives told to teachers over a period of 8 months. The narrative analysis revealed that in most of the narratives the teachers were passive listeners or were concerned about the structure of events. The teachers seldom asked questions about the children’s mental state or disagreed with the child in ways that revealed their different beliefs. Suggestions about implications of this study are that early childhood teacher education should focus on talking with children about what they may think or believe concerning narrated events, and also reveal what they think and believe themselves.

Filled pauses in Hungarian: Their phonetic form and function

Filled pauses are natural occurrences in spontaneous speech and they may turn up at any level of the speech planning process and in a number of functions. The aim of this paper is to find out whether the diverse functions of filled pauses correlate with diverse articulations resulting in diverse acoustic structures. Spontaneous narratives are used as research material. The duration of the filled pauses and the frequency values of their first two formants are analyzed. The most frequent form, schwa, shows function-dependent realizations as confirmed by the durational values and by the second formant values of these vowel-like sounds.