Conversational Turns Research Articles

Speech act recognition in Spanish speakers

Language comprehension involves the recognition of speech acts. The term speech act refers to what a speaker intends to accomplish when saying something. Holtgraves (2008) demonstrated that English speakers can automatically recognize speech acts, and proposes that this allows an efficient (good-enough) processing of conversation turns. Other studies have found that speech act recognition requires cognitive process like executive functions, theory of mind, and empathy. However, there are few studies that have empirically investigated which are the cognitive functions needed for speech act recognition in healthy adults. The aim of this work was to study if Spanish speakers automatically recognize speech acts, and if this recognition is related to intellectual ability and other cognitive functions. We examined this question using the methods described by Holtgraves (2005, 2008). First, we translated and adapted the scenarios, and selected those that were better understood. Then, we designed two experiments to test the automatic recognition of speech acts. Participants underwent a battery of psychometric and cognitive tests. We found significant differences in reaction times between control and experimental scenarios, which indicates that Spanish speakers automatically recognize speech acts. A measure of intellectual ability, as well as the ability to reason about mental states of others, predicted in part the ability to recognize speech acts.

“Are You Into Beer Pong?” Exploring Question-Answer Sequences in an L2 Oral Performance Assessment

ABSTRACTDespite the frequent occurrence of yes/no questions in naturalistic talk-in-interaction, there is widespread concern that yes/no questions only allow predetermined answers and limit L2 learners’ performance in language assessment contexts. Drawing upon audio-recordings of role-play conversations between an L1 American English speaker and 104 L2 English learners, we use conversation analysis to examine how L2 learners respond to yes/no questions in an oral performance assessment. The analysis was guided by the following research questions: (a) How do L2 English learners respond to a yes/no interrogative in a role-play assessment context? (b) How do L2 English learners’ different responses lead to distinct sequences of conversational turns? In our analysis we show that yes/no interrogatives elicit a range of responses (e.g., repair initiation, type-conforming responses, non-type-conforming responses) that result in negotiation of meaning between participants. While turn design and sequence organization features we observed largely align with the existing literature on naturally occurring conversations, we also discuss deviant cases that provide insights into L2 learner discourse. Moreover, we discuss the findings in terms of implications for L2 assessment.

A Cross-cultural Mixed Methods Investigation of Language Socialization Practices.

This embedded mixed methods study explores how cultural differences in language socialization practices influence parent-child verbal interactions. The Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) System audio recorded families of children who are and are not deaf and hard of hearing in Canada and Vietnam. Software automatically calculated an average conversational turn count. Canadian families participated in more turns than Vietnamese families regardless of hearing status. Interviews with the children's caregivers provided context for these results. Within Vietnamese families, the language socialization practice "Intelligence" results in reduced opportunities for turn-taking, while the Canadian focus on creating personal "Identity" encouraged them. "Intelligence" encompasses Vietnamese participants' desire to ensure their children are learning and "Identity" expresses the Canadian participants' appeal to encourage individuality in their children. The findings suggest directions for the adaptation of intervention. It is the first known study to incorporate LENA results into a mixed methods design.

Developing a Thai emotional speech corpus from Lakorn (EMOLA)

Advances in emotional speech recognition and synthesis essentially rely on the availability of annotated emotional speech corpora. As a low resource language, the Thai language critically lacks corpora of emotional speech, although a few corpora have been constructed for speech recognition and synthesis. This paper presents the design of a Thai emotional speech corpus (namely EMOLA), its construction and annotation process, and its analysis. In the corpus design, four basic types with twelve subtypes of emotions are defined with consideration of the Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance emotional state model. To construct the corpus, a series of Thai dramas (1397 min) were selected and its video clips of approximately 868 min were annotated. As a result, 8987 transcriptions (of conversation turns) were derived in total, with each transcription tagged as one basic type and a few subtypes. Finally, an analysis was conducted to describe the characteristics of this corpus in three sets of statistics: collection-level, annotator-oriented and actor-oriented statistics.

Mapping the terrain of person-centered supportive conversations

ABSTRACTThis study explores the conversational terrain of supportive conversations that vary in person centeredness (PC). Our team transcribed and unitized 223 conversations in which a discloser talked about an upsetting event to a listener trained to exhibit either low (LPC), moderate (MPC), or highly person-centered (HPC) comfort. Each utterance was coded for PC with a modified version of the traditional nine-level hierarchy. HPC-coded turns comprised 24% of HPC conversations, while LPC-coded turns comprised almost half of LPC conversations. Over 95% of turns in MPC conversations were classified as MPC. Additionally, turn-level coding and global ratings of PC differentially predicted outcomes. We discuss the implications of these conversational profiles in the context of how the PC content of conversations might aid in cognitive reappraisal.

Effectiveness of video-based modelling to facilitate conversational turn taking of adolescents with autism spectrum disorder who use AAC

This study evaluated and compared the effectiveness of packaged video modelling (VM) and video self-modelling (VSM) interventions to develop conversational behaviors with four adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who used augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). The study was conducted using an alternating treatments design nested within a multiple baseline design. The intervention effect was measured using Robust-Improvement Rate Difference (R-IRD). The results demonstrated that, overall, video-based modelling used in conjunction with a system of least prompts was effective in promoting conversation skills in adolescents with ASD who used AAC. Without the systematic instruction, R-IRD indicated that these techniques yielded only small to moderate intervention effects. The findings demonstrated the necessity of systematic instruction for this group of participants. This investigation provides preliminary evidence to support the use of packaged video-based modelling interventions to develop conversation skills in adolescents with ASD who use AAC systems.

Text Recitation in Foreign Language Learning: Its Effectiveness on the Learning of Multi-word Expressions

This paper reports on a small-scale study that explored the extent to which two types of recitation tasks that engaged foreign language learners in memorization of conversational turns prepared in advance would differentially lead to the learning of multi-word expressions. Three groups of Japanese college learners of English participated in this research: a whole-text recitation group, a partial-text recitation group, and a contrast group. Results of the speaking tests administered suggest that whole- and partialtext recitation approaches are both conducive to the learning of language chunks and that there is considerable variance in facilitative effects between the two.

Language Experience in the Second Year of Life and Language Outcomes in Late Childhood.

Quantity of talk and interaction in the home during early childhood is correlated with socioeconomic status (SES) and can be used to predict early language and cognitive outcomes. We tested the effectiveness of automated early language environment estimates for children 2 to 36 months old to predict cognitive and language skills 10 years later and examined effects for specific developmental age periods. Daylong audio recordings for 146 infants and toddlers were completed monthly for 6 months, and the total number of daily adult words and adult-child conversational turnswere automatically estimated with Language Environment Analysis software. Follow-up evaluations at 9 to 14 years of age included language and cognitive testing. Language exposure for 3 age groups was assessed: 2 to 17 months, 18 to 24 months, and ≥25 months. Pearson correlations and multiple linear regression analyses were conducted. Conversational turn counts at 18 to 24 months of age accounted for 14% to 27% of the variance in IQ, verbal comprehension, and receptive and/or expressive vocabulary scores 10 years later after controlling for SES. Adult word counts between 18 and 24 months were correlated with language outcomes but were considerably weakened after controlling for SES. These data support the hypothesis that early talk and interaction, particularly during the relatively narrow developmental window of 18 to 24 months of age, can be used to predict school-age language and cognitive outcomes. With these findings, we underscore the need for effective early intervention programs that support parents in creating an optimal early language learning environment in the home.

Using the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) System to Investigate Cultural Differences in Conversational Turn Count

This study investigates how the variables of culture and hearing status might influence the amount of parent-child talk families engage in throughout an average day. Seventeen Vietnamese and 8 Canadian families of children with hearing loss and 17 Vietnamese and 13 Canadian families with typically hearing children between the ages of 18 and 48 months old participated in this cross-comparison design study. Each child wore a Language ENvironment Analysis system digital language processor for 3 days. An automated vocal analysis then calculated an average conversational turn count (CTC) for each participant as the variable of investigation. The CTCs for the 4 groups were compared using a Kruskal-Wallis test and a set of planned pairwise comparisons. The Canadian families participated in significantly more conversational turns than the Vietnamese families. No significant difference was found between the Vietnamese or the Canadian cohorts as a function of hearing status. Culture, but not hearing status, influences CTCs as derived by the Language ENvironment Analysis system. Clinicians should consider how cultural communication practices might influence their suggestions for language stimulation.

How Long Does it Take to Say ‘Well’? Evidence from the Audio BNC

This paper reports on an acoustic analysis of ‘well’ in conversation, building on recent attempts at examining the vocal realization of the marker (e.g., Aijmer in Understanding pragmatic markers. A variational pragmatic approach. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2013; Romero-Trillo in Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 2018). ‘Well’ is a prime example of a highly multi-functional item performing a large number of distinct pragmatic and syntactic functions. The aim of the study is to test what I call, following Hoey (Lexical priming. A new theory of words and language. Routledge, London/New York, 2005), the ‘priming hypothesis’ suggesting that the syntactic and the pragmatic functions of ‘well’ are distinguishable on acoustic grounds, specifically by the duration they have in conversational speaking turns. The data examined include a subset of 9-word turns extracted from the Audio BNC (Coleman et al. in Audio BNC: the audio edition of the Spoken British National Corpus. Phonetics Laboratory, University of Oxford, Oxford, 2012) of which the durations of more than 300 tokens of ‘well’ were measured in Praat, an acoustic analysis software (Boersma and Weenink in Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program], http://www.praat.org/ , 2012). The results mostly confirm the priming hypothesis: syntactic ‘well’ has significantly longer duration than pragmatic ‘well’. In the concluding sections I discuss this result with a view to the larger question as to how discourse duration enters into the range of factors, including not only duration but also collocation and position in the turn, that hearers in conversation draw on in order to disambiguate the distinct uses of ‘well’. The study also offers intriguing implications for the theory of priming (Hoey in Lexical priming. A new theory of words and language. Routledge, London/New York, 2005), suggesting the possibility that polysemous words are not only primed for certain verbal contexts but also for certain properties pertaining to the non-verbal modalities.

Maternal education influences Australian infants' language experience from six months.

Disparities in children's early language skills associated with socioeconomic factors have led to many studies examining children's early language environments, but few as yet in the first year of life. This longitudinal study assessed the home language environments of 50 Australian infants, who varied in maternal education (university education, or not). Full-day audio recordings were collected and analyzed using the LENA system when infants were aged 6-9months and 12-15months. Using the device-specific analysis software, we assessed 12-h projected counts of (1) adult speech input, (2) conversational interactions, and (3) child vocalizations. At both ages, higher maternal education was associated with higher counts of adult words and conversational turns, but not child vocalizations. The study adds to the literature by demonstrating disparities in the infants' language experience within the first year of life, related to mothers' education, with implications for early intervention and parenting supports.

The Conversational Turn in Shakespeare

The OED distinguishes two principal senses of the word “conversation”: “the action of living or having one’s being in a place or among persons”, and “interchange of words, thoughts”. The first (indicating a kind of habitus, frequently with moral inflection) presumes more about a conversant than the second. Hence in Pericles Gower speaks of the hero as “the good in conversation”. While there is some overlap, there is a significant gap in meaning and a kind of cultural struggle waged between the two. In the early modern period the first sense (deriving from Augustine and the Theatrum Mundi) might be thought of as dominant and the second emergent. Both were the focus of theoretical elaboration: the first principally by puritans (resulting in a register of “Christian conversation”), the second in two principle ways, by Steffano Guazzo and Montaigne. Guazzo’s Civile Conversation (tr.1581, 1586) begins by conceding its profanity in Augustinian terms, but then proceeds to redefine the word in a secular, pragmatic and essentially modern sense. Montaigne’s understanding of conversation is informed by Guazzo’s but adds a sophisticated understanding of conversation as dialectic. What I propose is to sketch these various meanings of the word “conversation”, speak to the “turn” from one end of its spectrum of meanings to the other, and then identify this spectrum of meanings in Shakespeare. That Shakespeare understands conversation in its pragmatic sense should come as no surprise, but that he should systematically understand it in the sense of a moral habitus while also exploring it in the sense of dialectic should surprise.

Assessing multimodal speech-gesture coordination: correlation map analysis for signal comparison

Speech acoustics and body movements are systematically linked during speaking; however, there is no consensus regarding which acoustic and/or kinematic signals are relevant for this coordination nor what critical landmarks facilitate this linkage. To address this, we use correlation map analysis (CMA) of speech acoustics and body movement to assess the hypothesis that speech and gesture are coordinated at prosodically prominent speech regions. CMA allows for the analysis of correlation between any two continuous signals both instantaneously and at user-defined ranges of delay. In this study, we examine the relationship of the speech’s RMS acoustic amplitude signal with the dominant hand’s velocity signal at speech turns, phrase boundaries, acoustic amplitude peaks, and other (elsewhere) regions. We find that turns and phrase edges exhibit the greatest likelihood of positive correlation. Additionally, the likelihood of correlation is higher when the hand velocity signal is delayed with respect to the amplitude signal. These results suggest that speech and gesture may be strongly linked at speech turn landmarks for the purpose of signaling a floor exchange. Thus in addition to coordination for semantic and prosodic purposes, we propose that speech-gesture coordination can serve with prosody to signal speech turns in conversation. [Work supported by NIH.]

Language Exposure Relates to Structural Neural Connectivity in Childhood.

Neuroscience research has elucidated broad relationships between socioeconomic status (SES) and young children's brain structure, but there is little mechanistic knowledge about specific environmental factors that are associated with specific variation in brain structure. One environmental factor, early language exposure, predicts children's linguistic and cognitive skills and later academic achievement, but how language exposure relates to neuroanatomy is unknown. By measuring the real-world language exposure of young children (ages 4-6 years, 27 male/13 female), we confirmed the preregistered hypothesis that greater adult-child conversational experience, independent of SES and the sheer amount of adult speech, is related to stronger, more coherent white matter connectivity in the left arcuate and superior longitudinal fasciculi on average, and specifically near their anterior termination at Broca's area in left inferior frontal cortex. Fractional anisotropy of significant tract subregions mediated the relationship between conversational turns and children's language skills and indicated a neuroanatomical mechanism underlying the SES "language gap." Post hoc whole-brain analyses revealed that language exposure was not related to any other white matter tracts, indicating the specificity of this relationship. Results suggest that the development of dorsal language tracts is environmentally influenced, specifically by early, dialogic interaction. Furthermore, these findings raise the possibility that early intervention programs aiming to ameliorate disadvantages in development due to family SES may focus on increasing children's conversational exposure to capitalize on the early neural plasticity underlying cognitive development.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Over the last decade, cognitive neuroscience has highlighted the detrimental impact of disadvantaged backgrounds on young children's brain structure. However, to intervene effectively, we must know which proximal aspects of the environmental aspects are most strongly related to neural development. The present study finds that young children's real-world language exposure, and specifically the amount of adult-child conversation, correlates with the strength of connectivity in the left hemisphere white matter pathway connecting two canonical language regions, independent of socioeconomic status and the sheer volume of adult speech. These findings suggest that early intervention programs aiming to close the achievement gap may focus on increasing children's conversational exposure to capitalize on the early neural plasticity underlying cognitive development.

Neurodivergent intersubjectivity: Distinctive features of how autistic people create shared understanding.

Autistic people are neurologically divergent, yet approaches to studying autism are framed by neurotypical definitions of being social. Using the concept of intersubjectivity, which conceptualises a variety of ways of socially relating, we investigate distinctive features of how autistic people build social understanding. A total of 30 members of a charity supporting adults with autism were video-recorded during a social activity they enjoyed, namely collaborative video gaming. Mapping the coherence, affect and symmetry of each conversational turn revealed shifting patterns of intersubjectivity within each interaction. Focussing on clusters of consistent and fragmented turns led us to identify two features of neurodivergent intersubjectivity: a generous assumption of common ground that, when understood, led to rapid rapport, and, when not understood, resulted in potentially disruptive utterances; and a low demand for coordination that ameliorated many challenges associated with disruptive turns. Our findings suggest that neurodivergent intersubjectivity reveals potential for unconventional forms of social relating and that a within-interaction analysis is a viable methodology for exploring neurodivergent communication. Future research should examine the varieties of neurodivergent intersubjectivity, with associated problems and potentials, and how those forms of intersubjectivity can be enabled to flourish, particularly in autistic-to-neurotypical encounters.

A year in words: The dynamics and consequences of language experiences in an intervention classroom.

Children from low SES backgrounds hear, on average, fewer words at home than those from high SES backgrounds. This word gap is associated with widening achievement differences in children’s language abilities and school readiness. However relatively little is known about adult and child speech in childcare settings, in which approximately 30% of American children are enrolled. We examined the influence of teacher and peer language input on children’s in-class language use and language development in an intervention classroom for low-SES, high-risk 2- to 3-year-olds. Over the course of a year, day-long recordings of the classroom were collected weekly with LENA recorders. Using LENA software algorithms, we found that language input from peers was positively related to children’s in-class language use, both in-the-moment and over the course of each day, as were the number of conversational turns in which children and teachers engaged Both peer input and conversational turns with teachers were also positively related to children’s language development rates, as indexed by increases in vocabulary size. Together these results indicate the importance of child-specific rates of classroom language input in the language development of high-risk, preschoolers.

Infant-Mother Acoustic-Prosodic Alignment and Developmental Risk.

One promising early marker for autism and other communicative and language disorders is early infant speech production. Here we used daylong recordings of high- and low-risk infant-mother dyads to examine whether acoustic-prosodic alignment as well as two automated measures of infant vocalization are related to developmental risk status indexed via familial risk and developmental progress at 36 months of age. Automated analyses of the acoustics of daylong real-world interactions were used to examine whether pitch characteristics of one vocalization by the mother or the child predicted those of the vocalization response by the other speaker and whether other features of infants' speech in daylong recordings were associated with developmental risk status or outcomes. Low-risk and high-risk dyads did not differ in the level of acoustic-prosodic alignment, which was overall not significant. Further analyses revealed that acoustic-prosodic alignment did not predict infants' later developmental progress, which was, however, associated with two automated measures of infant vocalizations (daily vocalizations and conversational turns). Although further research is needed, these findings suggest that automated measures of vocalizations drawn from daylong recordings are a possible early identification tool for later developmental progress/concerns. https://osf.io/cdn3v/.

Conversational Turns Linked to Better Language Development in Children

Conversational Turns Linked to Better Language Development in Children

Hierarchical Methods for a Unified Approach to Discourse, Domain, and Style in Neural Conversational Models

With the advent of personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa, there has been a renewed focus on dialog systems, specifically open domain conversational agents. Dialog is a challenging problem since it spans multiple conversational turns. To further complicate the problem, there are many contextual cues and valid possible utterances. Dialog is fundamentally a multiscale process given that context is carried from previous utterances in the conversation; however, current neural methods lack the ability to carry human-like conversation. Neural dialog models are based on recurrent neural network Encoder-Decoder sequence-to-sequence models (Sutskever, Vinyals, and Le, 2014; Bahdanau, Cho, and Bengio, 2015). However, these models lack the ability to create temporal and stylistic coherence in conversations. We propose to incorporate dialog acts (such as Statement-non-opinion ["Me, I'm in the legal department."], Acknowledge ["Uh-huh."]) and discourse connectives (e.g. "because," "then"), utterance clustering and domain prediction, and style shifting using hierarchical methods. In particular, we show that clustering of utterance representations automatically allows for a unified hierarchical approach to discourse, domain, and style.

Beyond the 30-Million-Word Gap: Children’s Conversational Exposure Is Associated With Language-Related Brain Function

Children’s early language exposure impacts their later linguistic skills, cognitive abilities, and academic achievement, and large disparities in language exposure are associated with family socioeconomic status (SES). However, there is little evidence about the neural mechanisms underlying the relation between language experience and linguistic and cognitive development. Here, language experience was measured from home audio recordings of 36 SES-diverse 4- to 6-year-old children. During a story-listening functional MRI task, children who had experienced more conversational turns with adults—independently of SES, IQ, and adult-child utterances alone—exhibited greater left inferior frontal (Broca’s area) activation, which significantly explained the relation between children’s language exposure and verbal skill. This is the first evidence directly relating children’s language environments with neural language processing, specifying both an environmental and a neural mechanism underlying SES disparities in children’s language skills. Furthermore, results suggest that conversational experience impacts neural language processing over and above SES or the sheer quantity of words heard.