Conversational Utterances Research Articles

Conversational Time Travel: Evidence of a Retrospective Bias in Real Life Conversations.

We examined mental time travel reflected onto individuals’ utterances in real-life conversations using a naturalistic observation method: Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR, a portable audio recorder that periodically and unobtrusively records snippets of ambient sounds and speech). We introduced the term conversational time travel and examined, for the first time, how much individuals talked about their personal past versus personal future in real life. Study 1 included 9,010 sound files collected from 51 American adults who carried the EAR over 1 weekend and were recorded every 9 min for 50 s. Study 2 included 23,103 sound files from 33 young and 48 healthy older adults from Switzerland who carried the EAR for 4 days (2 weekdays and 1 weekend, counterbalanced). 30-s recordings occurred randomly throughout the day. We developed a new coding scheme for conversational time travel: We listened to all sound files and coded each file for whether the participant was talking or not. Those sound files that included participant speech were also coded in terms of their temporal focus (e.g., past, future, present, time-independent) and autobiographical nature (i.e., about the self, about others). We, first, validated our coding scheme using the text analysis tool, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Next, we compared the percentages of past- and future-oriented utterances about the self (to tap onto conversational time travel). Results were consistent across all samples and showed that participants talked about their personal past two to three times as much as their personal future (i.e., retrospective bias). This is in contrast to research showing a prospective bias in thinking behavior, based on self-report and experience-sampling methods. Findings are discussed in relation to the social functions of recalling the personal past (e.g., sharing memories to bond with others, to update each other, to teach, to give advice) and to the directive functions of future-oriented thought (e.g., planning, decision making, goal setting that are more likely to happen privately in the mind). In sum, the retrospective bias in conversational time travel seems to be a functional and universal phenomenon across persons and across real-life situations.

Figuring Out the Intended Meaning of Intonation in Some English Conversational Utterances

The study aims at figuring out the intended meaning of intonation in some English conversational utterances together with identifying pitch variations that are determined by various syntactic constructions that impart the same illocutionary force of utterances. However, intonation is needed to delimit the communicative forces of utterances by virtue of its structure which the speakers intend to convey .This paper consists of four sections .Section one deals with phonology and its types .Section two discusses intonation in relation to style , forms and functions. Section three sheds some light on pragmatics. Section four deals in details with the intended meaning of intonation in some English conversational utterances. This paper comes up with meanings that are changed by virtue of ranges of intonation and pragmatics changes emotions from one person to another by rising or falling the voice of the speakers. In addition, the intended meaning function of intonation plays a role in determining the emotions of the speaker by ranges of intonation.

A logic for the natural language conditional

Ordinary speakers intuitively assign truth-values to conditional utterances in everyday conversation, but, despite the general ease with which this occurs, it is notoriously difficult to give an account of the implicit logic that is followed in making these truth-value assignments. I propose a twofold logic of the conditional – a relatively simple “factual” logic for conditionals interpreted with regard to what is actually the case, largely following the logic of the material conditional; combined with a variably strict possible-worlds counterfactual logic for conditionals interpreted with regard to with what may be (or may have been) the case, incorporating a ceteris paribus clause. This theory is able to deal with a number of challenges for other prominent views of the conditional, such as counter-intuitive truth-value ascriptions provided by notions of similarity or closeness, and difficulties adequately accounting for phenomena such as reverse Sobel sequences.

Well, Now What Do We Do? Wait . . .: A Group Process Analysis of Meeting Lateness

Workplace meetings start late all the time for a number of reasons. When participants are kept waiting, this can be experienced as a drain of personal resources. In this article, we integrate perspectives from conservation of resources theory, individual goal setting, group problem solving, and temporal dynamics to derive predictions regarding individual attendees’ meeting experiences and behavioral group communication patterns under conditions of meeting lateness. We conducted an experiment using 32 student groups in which 16 groups started their meeting on time, while 16 started their meeting 10 minutes late. We found that late meetings were less satisfying than on time meetings. Using videotaped meeting interactions, we analyzed the group dynamics at the micro-level of conversational utterances. Controlling for meeting duration, groups in the lateness condition showed substantially less solution-focused communication overall, less idea elaboration, less in-depth problem descriptions, and fewer socioemotional support statements than groups who started on time. Furthermore, lag sequential analysis revealed distinctly different temporal communication patterns. We discuss research implications for understanding meeting experiences through a conservation of resources lens as well as practical implications for managing group communication processes in workplace meetings.

IMPLIKATUR DALAM PERCAKAPAN SINETRON PARA PENCARI TUHAN

The aim of this research is to know conversational implicature in Para PencariTuhan (PPT) TV-series (volume I), especially to know and describe the kinds ofmaxim which float in PPT TV-series (volume I) and to describe the background offloating maxim in conversational implicature at PPT TV-series(volume I). This isqualitative research. The data of this research are conversational implicature ofsome utterances in PPT TV-series (volume I). The source of data is Para PencariTuhan TV-series (volume I, episode I) produced by PT Demi Gisela Citra Sinema.The researcher obtain the data through documentation technique. This techniquestarts by listening whole implicature in PPT TV-series (volume I), taking note wholerelated data, classifying and taking note the data in data card. This research uses flowmodel analysis to analyze the data, which include collecting data, data reduction,data presentation, and conclusion or verification. The data analysis show that thereare floating in some coperative-principle of maxims, they are maxim quality (twoutterances), maxim manner (two utterances), maxim relevance (one utterance).The floating maxim in PPT TV-series are influenced by some factors, they are thesimilarity of presupposition, the speaker refers to certain reference, and the use oflocal interpretation.

Mélanges interpropositionnels chez les enfants bilingues franco-allemands

The literature on the mixing of two languages in children bilingual from birth distinguishes code switching on different levels, switching within the same sentence or utterance (‘intra-sentential switching’, ‘intra-utterance switching’ following Genesee, Boivin & Nicoladis, 1996 : 428–429) and mixing between sentences or utterances in the same conversation (‘inter-sentential switching’, ‘inter-utterance switching’). This article presents a longitudinal study on inter-sentential switching, still rarely investigated, in four bilingual French-German children between the age of two and four years. The main goal is to detect the characteristics of such switching, to increase our understanding as to whether they are comparable to intra-sentential switching in terms of frequency and motivation. Inter-sentential switching is much more frequent than intra-sentential switching. Analysis of the data shows that inter-sentential switching is frequent in the weaker language of children classified as imbalanced bilinguals during the study. In contrast, inter-sentential switching is nearly absent in children who are balanced bilinguals. Results also show that inter-sentential switching does not generally follow the characteristics of code-switching, but rather depends on emotional and cognitive factors.

Topic detection and tracking for conversational content by using conceptual dynamic latent Dirichlet allocation

This study proposes a conceptual dynamic latent Dirichlet allocation (CDLDA) model for topic detection and tracking in conversational content. Topic detection and tracking is vital for conversational communication, especially for spoken interactions. Because topic transitions occur frequently during conversational communication (i.e., a conversation usually contains many topics), language processors must detect different topics in conversational content. Considering the structure of spoken dialogue, the dynamic model was employed in this study to capture the sequence of two adjacent topics in spoken content. The proposed model applies the proportions of verbs and nouns to analyze the similarity between utterances. An agglomerative clustering algorithm, based on an ontology defined in E-HowNet, clusters conversational utterances. Because the topic structure of conversational content is friable, E-HowNet uses hypernym relationships of speech acts to obtain robust solutions, even for sparse data. Compared with the traditional latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model, which detects topics only through a bag-of-words technique, the proposed model considers temporal features by introducing dynamic concepts. Experimental results revealed that the proposed approach outperformed the traditional DLDA and LDA and support vector machine models, in addition to achieving excellent performance for topic detection and tracking in conversations.

Stance and Grammatical Complexity in Conversation: An Unlikely Partnership Discovered through Corpus Analysis

The present paper attempts to synthesize results from two independent lines of corpus-based research: One focused on grammatical complexity, and the second focused on the expression of stance. The paper begins by describing an unexpected pattern of use in conversational discourse: Despite the fact that conversation is co-constructed by multiple participants, producing language in real-time and discussing personal topics, it is characterized by an extremely dense use of dependent clauses. Corpus-based findings regarding the use of stance expressions are less surprising, showing how stance devices are more commonly used in conversation than in academic writing. The main focus of the present paper is to explore the intersection between these two lines of research, showing how many grammatically complex structures in conversation are used to support the functional prominence given to the expression of stance in that register. That is, utterances in conversation often involve two grammatical components, with an idea or a report of an action occurring as the dependent clause, and an expression of stance occurring as the main clause that provides the interpretive frame for the information in the dependent clause. As a result, it is not a coincidence that personal expressions of stance as well as complex grammatical structures are both so prevalent in conversational discourse.

A Study on Response Utterances in Intergenerational Conflict Conversations

A Study on Response Utterances in Intergenerational Conflict Conversations

Input and uptake at 7 months predicts toddler vocabulary: the role of child-directed speech and infant processing skills in language development.

Both the input directed to the child, and the child's ability to process that input, are likely to impact the child's language acquisition. We explore how these factors inter-relate by tracking the relationships among: (a) lexical properties of maternal child-directed speech to prelinguistic (7-month-old) infants (N = 121); (b) these infants' abilities to segment lexical targets from conversational child-directed utterances in an experimental paradigm; and (c) the children's vocabulary outcomes at age 2;0. Both repetitiveness in maternal input and the child's speech segmentation skills at age 0;7 predicted language outcomes at 2;0; moreover, while these factors were somewhat inter-related, they each had independent effects on toddler vocabulary skill, and there was no interaction between the two.

Examining the relationship between speech intensity and self-rated communicative effectiveness in individuals with Parkinson's disease and hypophonia

PurposeTo examine the relationship between speech intensity and self-ratings of communicative effectiveness in speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD) and hypophonia. An additional purpose was to evaluate if self-ratings of communicative effectiveness made by participants with PD differed from ratings made by primary communication partners. MethodsThirty participants with PD and 15 healthy older adults completed the Communication Effectiveness Survey. Thirty primary communication partners rated the communicative effectiveness of his/her partner with PD. Speech intensity was calculated for participants with PD and control participants based on conversational utterances. ResultsResults revealed significant differences between groups in conversational speech intensity (p=.001). Participants with PD self-rated communicative effectiveness significantly lower than control participants (p=.000). Correlational analyses revealed a small but non-significant relationship between speech intensity and communicative effectiveness for participants with PD (r=0.298, p=.110) and control participants (r=0.327, p=.234). Self-ratings of communicative effectiveness made participants with PD was not significantly different than ratings made by primary communication partners (p=.20). ConclusionsObtaining information on communicative effectiveness may help to broaden outcome measurement and may aid in the provision of educational strategies. Findings also suggest that communicative effectiveness may be a separate and a distinct construct that cannot necessarily be predicted from the severity of hypophonia.

Turn-timing in signed conversations: coordinating stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries.

In spoken interactions, interlocutors carefully plan, and time their utterances, minimizing gaps and overlaps between consecutive turns. Cross-linguistic comparison has indicated that spoken languages vary only minimally in terms of turn-timing, and language acquisition research has shown pre-linguistic vocal turn-taking in the first half year of life. These observations suggest that the turn-taking system may provide a fundamental basis for our linguistic capacities. The question remains, however, to what extent our capacity for rapid turn-taking is determined by modality constraints. The avoidance of overlapping turns could be motivated by the difficulty of hearing and speaking at the same time. If so, turn-taking in sign might show greater toleration for overlap. Alternatively, signed conversations may show a similar distribution of turn-timing as spoken languages, thus avoiding both gaps and overlaps. To address this question we look at turn-timing in question–answer sequences in spontaneous conversations of Sign Language of the Netherlands. The findings indicate that although there is considerable overlap in two or more signers’ articulators in conversation, when proper allowance is made for onset preparation, post-utterance retraction and the intentional holding of signs for response, turn-taking latencies in sign look remarkably like those reported for spoken language. This is consistent with the possibility that, at least with regard to responses to questions, speakers and signers follow similar time courses in planning and producing their utterances in on-going conversation. This suggests that turn-taking systems may well be a shared cognitive infrastructure underlying all modern human languages, both spoken and signed.

Humour in colloquial conversation

Researchers from the GRIALE group (Irony and Humour Research Group) have developed a theoretical method that can be applied to humorous ironic utterances in different textual genres, depending on the degree of the violation of conversational principles in conversation. In addition to this, the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo and Raskin, 1991) will be taken into account in the analysis. Therefore, I will study irony and humour in conversational utterances in real examples of Peninsular Spanish obtained from the COVJA, (Corpus de conversaciones coloquiales [Corpus of Colloquial Conversations]) and CREA, (Corpus de Referencia del Espanol Actual [Reference Corpus of Present-Day Spanish]). The focus of this paper is then the application of the aforementioned theories to humorous ironic statements which arise in conversation. I will also examine the positive or negative effects caused by them, which will additionally verify if irony and humour coexist in the same conversational exchange, and if this has a communicative goal.

Can negative mood improve your conversation? Affective influences on conforming to Grice's communication norms

AbstractCan temporary mood influence people's communication strategies? According to Grice's cooperative principle, conversational utterances should ideally conform to the maxims of quantity, relevance, quality, and manner. Three experiments predicted and found that participants in a negative mood complied significantly better with Grice's maxims than did participants in a positive mood when using natural language to describe a previously observed social event. Experiments 2 and 3 further confirmed that mood influenced communication strategies, and not merely the encoding (Exp. 2) and retrieval (Exp. 3) of the relevant information. These findings are consistent with affect–cognition theories predicting that positive affect promotes a more internally focused and assimilative thinking and communication style, and negative mood promotes more externally focused and accommodative thinking, resulting in the closer observance of communication norms. The relevance of these findings for recent affect/cognition theories is considered, and the practical implications of the results for everyday conversational strategies are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Pragmatic language production deficits in Parkinson’s disease

This study examines pragmatic language production deficits in people with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Participants (PD and non-PD) were interviewed and their responses coded for degree of informativeness. PD participants weremore under-informative than non-PD participants. Response underinformativeness was associated with decreased executive control, mental status, and speech act comprehension measures. However, both speech act priming and utterance informativeness were strongly related to a measure of executive control, and when this variable (i.e., Stroop performance) was controlled, the correlation between speech act priming and utterance underinformativeness was no longer significant. It appears, then, that executive control deficits are related to the ability to comprehend and produce conversational utterances.

An exploratory study of clinician real-time morpho-syntactic judgements with pre-school children

The purpose of this study was to explore the feasibility of employing real-time morpho-syntactic judgements. A system of capturing real-time judgements of children's utterances was implemented using a modified talk-time sampling procedure with 13 monolingual, English-speaking US pre-school children who had standard scores above 85 on a norm-referenced measure of language ability, four of whom had histories of diagnosed language deficits and were receiving language therapy. The remaining participants (n = 9) were typically-developing. The primary research questions were whether the linguistic data from abbreviated talk-time samples were comparable to traditional 100 utterance samples, and whether utterance level judgements made in real-time were in concordance with the linguistic data available in talk-time samples. Results of this investigation revealed positive and significant correlations in linguistic data across both forms of language sampling, as well as statistically significant inverse correlation between real-time judgement of utterance errors and mean length of utterances in morphemes (MLU-m), indicating that clinician decisions about children's utterances were closely associated with morpho-syntactic accuracy. Further analyses revealed that the percentage of conversational utterances with errors was different for children with and without histories of language impairment. Implications for potential clinical application and directions for future research are discussed.

Claiming Uncertainty in Recollection: A Study of Kke-Marked Utterances in Japanese Conversation

As part of a growing body of conversation analytic research on epistemics in social interaction, this study explores various uses of the Japanese sentence-final particle kke, which conveys the speaker's claim that she or he has some degree of uncertainty in recalling something from the past. The study aims to demonstrate how “mental” concepts like remembering and forgetting are grounded in, and bound to, communicative actions produced by interactants under the contingencies of everyday situations. To that end, the analysis shows how the act of claiming a particular mental state (i.e., uncertainty in recollection) is, in fact, motivated by such interactional concerns as acknowledging one's own responsibility for knowing something, invoking a particular social relationship with the recipient in bringing up a new conversational topic, and minimizing social disaffiliation when disagreeing with the previous speaker's assertion.

Translation and Capture Architecture for Output of Conversational Utterances

Architecture that combines capture and translation of concepts, goals, needs, locations, objects, locations, and items (e.g., sign text) into complete conversational utterances that take a translation of the item, and morph it with fluidity into sets of sentences that can be echoed to a user, and that the user can select to communicate speech (or textual utterances). A plurality of modalities that process images, audio, video, searches and cultural context, for example, which are representative of at least context and/or content, and can be employed to glean additional information regarding a communications exchange to facilitate more accurate and efficient translation. Gesture recognition can be utilized to enhance input recognition, urgency, and/or emotional interaction, for example. Speech can be used for document annotation. Moreover, translation (e.g., speech to speech, text to speech, speech to text, handwriting to speech, text or audio, . . . ) can be significantly improved in combination with this architecture.

A Method for Using Discounted Utterances in Spontaneous Conversation

Using Discounted Utterances (DUs) in spontaneous conversation by applying text mining technology, extraction, and evaluation, we focused on DUs where values were buried in previous conversations. We discovered DU potentials by reconsidering them through human-computer interaction. Onlinechat experiments clarified DU features and demonstrated our system’s importance. We found DUs involving (1) experiences shared by the subjects, (2) subjects’ unique experiences, concerns, or beliefs, and (3) apparent unimportance or unrecognized potential. Results of the experiments showed our evaluation method to be appropriate for calculating DU importance when DUs involving (3) were valued significantly lower than (1) and (2). Experiments also suggested that most DUs extracted by the system were not indeed completely ignored but included subjects’ unique stories involving main contexts. Such stories were based on subjects’ unique experiences and may be useful for helping subjects’ metacognition. The system may also enable nonsubjects to infer subjects and their thinking.

Special Issue on Human Symbiotic System

With opportunities for human beings to coexist with artificial agents and autonomous robots are increasing, high-level interactive communication between them is increasingly needed. These human symbiotic systems are used for research on basic intelligent interaction design principles and methods and bidirectional communication based on effective collaboration and symbiosis between human beings and robots, agents, and computers, also known as artifacts. The research society on gHuman Symbiotic System (HSS)h was implemented by the Japan Society for Fuzzy Theory and Intelligent Informatics (SOFT) in 2007. The HSS encourages academic and industrial discussion of research on Human-Agent Interaction (HAI), Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The objective of this special issue is to activate and expand top-quality research of HSS theory and applications. Reflecting the fact that this research covers a wide range of topics, we invited researchers from fields including intelligent robotics, human-machine interfaces, and Kansei engineering to contribute. This issue thus provides much of the latest practical research on HSS, introduced by core members of the research society. Of the 22 papers received, 14 were accepted after input from two reviewers each. The first paper, by Y. Tamura et al., presents an attentive deskwork support system that delivers required items objects to deskworkers. The second, by H. Masuta et al., discusses an integrated perceptual system for intelligent service robots. The third, by S. Akiguchi, develops an automatic pattern generation system based on user impression. The fourth, by Y. Jiang et al., deals with a novel interface recognizing directional user intent based on forearm pressure exerted by the user of an omnidirectional walker. The fifth paper, by K. Terabayashi et al., investigates effects of preoperation on the experience of hands of different sizes by classifying preoperations based on the hand/object relationship. The sixth, by Y. Tamura et al., proposes segmenting a performerfs body imitating behavior observed based on a system from which values are obtained by reinforcement learning. The seventh, by D. Katagami et al., discusses group-adaptive behavior based on utterance contents and social standing of a robot. The eighth, by H. Yamaguchi et al., presents a system for using discounted utterances in spontaneous conversations applying text-mining technology. The ninth paper, by A. Otaki et al., focuses on the development of human negotiation skill through interaction between human players and computer agents in bargaining games. The tenth, by D. Katagami et al., is also related to human negotiation skill implementing human gestures in negotiation scenarios for three negotiation agents. The eleventh, by R. Taki et al., realizes interactive emotion communication - bidirectional communication based on emotional behavior between human beings and robots. The twelfth, by J. Ichino et al., investigates the psychological effects of color on online documents through a proposed online document interface. The thirteenth paper, by T. Ando et al., studies the robot facial effectiveness in human interpretation. The fourteenth, by T. Ando et al., models robot self-sufficiency applying an urge system focusing on autonomous emotion. This issue has addressed the importance of HSS and highlighted innovative approaches to the development of artificial system more friendly to users. We thank the authors and referees for their ongoing efforts, without which this issue would not have been possible.