Units Of Spoken Language Research Articles

Using Artificial Orthographies for Studying Cross-Linguistic Differences in the Cognitive and Neural Profiles of Reading.

Reading and writing are cultural inventions that have become vital skills to master in modern society. Unfortunately, writing systems are not equally learnable and many individuals struggle to become proficient readers. Languages and their writing systems often have co-varying characteristics, due to both psycholinguistic and socio-cultural forces. This makes it difficult to determine the source of cross-linguistic differences in reading and writing. Nonetheless, it is important to make progress on this issue: a more precise understanding of the factors that affect reading disparities should improve reading instruction theory and practice, and the diagnosis and treatment of reading disorders. In this review, we consider the value of artificial orthographies as a tool for unpacking the factors that create cognitive and neural differences in reading acquisition and skill. We do so by focusing on one dimension that differs among writing systems: grain size. Grain size, or the unit of spoken language that is mapped onto a visual graph, is thought to affect learning, but its impact is still not well understood. We review relevant literature about cross-linguistic writing system differences, the benefits of using artificial orthographies as a research tool, and our recent work with an artificial alphasyllabic writing system for English. We conclude that artificial orthographies can be used to elucidate cross-linguistic principles that affect reading and writing.

Assessment of Pharmacy Students' Communication Competence Using the Roter Interaction Analysis System During Objective Structured Clinical Examinations

<b>Objective.</b> To determine the value of using the Roter Interaction Analysis System during objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) to assess pharmacy students9 communication competence. <b>Methods.</b> As pharmacy students completed a clinical OSCE involving an interview with a simulated patient, 3 experts used a global rating scale to assess students9 overall performance in the interview, and both the student9s and patient9s languages were coded using the Roter Interaction Analysis System (RIAS). The coders recorded the number of utterances (ie, units of spoken language) in each RIAS category. Correlations between the raters9 scores and the number and types of utterances were examined. <b>Results.</b> There was a significant correlation between students9 global rating scores on the OSCE and the number of utterances in the RIAS socio-emotional category but not the RIAS business category. <b>Conclusions.</b> The RIAS proved to be a useful tool for assessing the socio-emotional aspect of students9 interview skills.

Assessment of Pharmacy Students' Communication Competence Using the Roter Interaction Analysis System During Objective Structured Clinical Examinations

To determine the value of using the Roter Interaction Analysis System during objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) to assess pharmacy students' communication competence. As pharmacy students completed a clinical OSCE involving an interview with a simulated patient, 3 experts used a global rating scale to assess students' overall performance in the interview, and both the student's and patient's languages were coded using the Roter Interaction Analysis System (RIAS). The coders recorded the number of utterances (ie, units of spoken language) in each RIAS category. Correlations between the raters' scores and the number and types of utterances were examined. There was a significant correlation between students' global rating scores on the OSCE and the number of utterances in the RIAS socio-emotional category but not the RIAS business category. The RIAS proved to be a useful tool for assessing the socio-emotional aspect of students' interview skills.

The development of young children's awareness of the word as a unit of spoken language

Young children's awareness of the word as a unit of spoken language was investigated in a series of five experiments that required children aged from 4 to 7 years to segment spoken language strings into words. The results of the first three experiments suggest that young children have considerable success in segmenting spoken language materials, regardless of the grammaticality of the strings, and regardless of the grammatical form class, plurality, or syllabic length of the component words. The basis of such successful segmentation ability was considered further in a fourth experiment, which indicated that children may use stress as a basis of response. A fifth experiment therefore manipulated syllabic stress and morphemic structure to determine what response strategies are employed by children of different ages in segmenting speech. The results suggest that 4- to 5-year-old children respond primarily on the basis of acoustic factors such as stress, whereas somewhat older 5- to 6-year-old children respond on the basis of (unbound) morphemic structure. By age 7, most children have abandoned strategies and now respond on the basis of word concept. Implications of these findings for reading acquisition are briefly indicated.

Temporal organization and prosody—perceptual aspects

The paper presents a review of recent research dealing with the perceptual aspects of temporal organization of spoken language and its prosodic structure. Special emphasis will be placed on the prosodic characteristics of discourse: units of spoken language that consist of more than one sentence. Results of a recent experiment will be reported, in which listeners were presented with filtered and unfiltered versions of a naturally produced narrative monologue, and were requested to identify sentence and paragraph and boundaries. The performance of the listeners in identifying boundaries will be correlated with the prosodic cues available to them in the filtered version, and the additional syntactic and semantic cues present in the unfiltered version. Analysis of listener responses makes it possible to separate the perceptual role of prosodic cues from that of syntactic and semantic cues. The distinction between the acoustic manifestation of sentence boundaries and paragraph boundaries will be likewise discussed.