Verbal Dialogue Research Articles

Bilateral speech system

A speech processor that both speaks and listens uses speech recognizers as well as speech synthesizers to allow a user to engage in a verbal dialog with a data base. An element of working memory holds whatever is the context of the dialog so that the system can respond to successive requests or statements with greater and greater specificity.

Art therapy with adolescents.

Understanding adolescents is a challenge at best, and the adolescent who is ill or suffering from psychological stress is an even greater conundrum. The physician treats the physical problem but often puzzles over where to find therapeutic treatment for this age group. Teenagers are sensitive about their image, particularly with their peers, and often put themselves at emotional risk rather than confess that they need help from a “shrink.” Furthermore, their view of the “talking” psychotherapies has been shaped by the movies, and they often think that these therapies are only for serious “mental” cases. In contrast, they come to art therapy without such preconceived ideas, and this form of therapy has proved effective with adolescents. Imagery taps into a person's earliest way of knowing and reacting to the world; therefore, it is not foreign to the experience of learning. Art as a language of therapy, combined with verbal dialogue, uses all of our capacities to find a more successful resolution to our difficulties. In art therapy, the client is asked to make a collage, make some marks on paper, or shape a small piece of clay to illustrate the difficulties that have brought them to therapy. The art therapist does not interpret the art piece, and the clients are free to share as much of the meaning of their art as they choose. Adolescents, in particular, are attracted to making symbols and graphic depictions; therefore, they are more attracted to using art as language than to verbal questioning. When the negative behavior is illustrated, it is then external to the individual, and the behavior thus becomes the problem, not the individual. This externalization of an internal stress or by the creation of “nonartistic art” allows both the therapist and the client to better address the problem. The therapist gains greater knowledge of the problem because the client uses metaphor and narrative to explain the product. The “art” allows clients to distance themselves from their own dilemma and, in that manner, work with the therapist toward alternative solutions to a problem.

Cognitive Therapy: A Complementary Strategy for Expressed Anger During the Restraint of an Aggressive Individual

This paper proposes a complementary strategy that works in conjunction with physical restraint and which seeks to address dysfunctional thinking patterns thought to be contributory to the maintenance of the emotion of anger during an incident of aggression. The paper also includes a clinical case example to illustrate a variety of techniques that are designed to engage, challenge and dispute negative automatic thoughts and expressed verbal dialogue in an individual who requires restraint due to his aggressive and potentially harmful behaviour, which is driven by anger.

Discourse and time in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

This article explores different verbal resources for the representation of time in drama. Drama as a genre is subjected to different pressures of time, given that the fictional time spans in the dramatic world must be realized within the real time allocated to a performance, a context which a dramatic text necessarily addresses. The temporal scope of plays can be highly expanded or contracted, but whatever option is used in a play, it is the result of the strategic exploitation of different resources. Theatre provides non-verbal means, like lighting and décor, but verbal resources are more dynamic. The verbal dialogue enacts speech events, and speech events are tied to spatio-temporal contexts, which can be transformed via speech use. The article examines various verbal resources like deixis, tense and aspect, lexical choices in clock and calendrical references, and pragmatics in order to explore their productive functions in constructing the complex and dynamic temporal world of one play, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Sets, Props and the 'Havanaise' in Fassbinder's Fontane Effi Briest

In adapting Theodor Fontane’s novel Effi Briest to the screen, Rainer Werner Fassbinder introduced symbols to suggest the unspoken thoughts and feelings of the characters, underlying conflicts, and later developments. Sets, props, clothing, even a musical theme, are enlisted in the story-telling process. Many of the symbols appear repeatedly in the film, always conveying the same basic meaning as in their first appearance. Thus the physical world presented on the screen becomes an articulate companion to the verbal dialogue and the narration by means of voice-overs and intertitles. The symbolism, engaging both the eye and the ear, adds interest and depth to the film and attests to the meticulous care that Fassbinder took in bringing the novel to the screen.

Henrik Ibsen's Theatre Mask. Tableau, Absorption and Theatricality in The Wild Duck

This article gives an analysis of Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck based on some concepts developed from Michael Fried's book Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Keywords are here: visuality, tableau, theatricality and absorption.It is my view that Ibsen is wrapped up in visuality in his plays, expressed not only by the richness of details and the precision of depiction given to the theater décor, but also by the way he chooses to introduce and develop the conflict. In addition to the verbal dialogue there is in The Wild Duck a “visual dialogue,” revolving around one dominant metaphor: the metaphor of photography. This makes life in the play unfold as if pictures were permanently taken both of the characters and by them. Life is here shaped as a long parade of spectacular stagings or tableaux, where the visual confrontations and conflicts between the characters can be described as an endless stream of clashes between the poser's self‐image and the seeing eye's interpretation of the person on display.The unconscious, which Ibsen explores in his late period, is rooted in the new visual culture brought forth by the overwhelming technical innovations in the visual field during the nineteenth century.

Multilingual spoken-language understanding in the MIT Voyager system

This paper describes our recent work in developing multilingual spoken language systems that support human-computer interactions. Our approach is based on the premise that a common semantic representation can be extracted from the input for all languages, at least within the context of restricted domains. In our design of such systems, language dependent information is separated from the system kernel as much as possible, and encoded in external data structures. The internal system manager, discourse and dialogue component, and database are all maintained in a language transparent form. Our description will focus on the development of the multilingual MIT Voyager spoken language system, which can engage in verbal dialogues with users about a geographical region within Cambridge, MA in the USA. The system can provide information about distances, travel times or directions between objects located within this area (e.g., restaurants, hotels, banks, libraries), as well as information such as the addresses, telephone numbers or location of the objects themselves. Voyager has been fully ported to Japanese and Italian, and we are in the process of porting to French and German as well. Evaluations for the English, Japanese and Italian systems are reported. Other related multilingual research activities are also briefly mentioned.

Partner Reading and Writing: Peer Social Dialogue and the Zone of Proximal Development

This classroom action research study investigated Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development using peer social dialogue integrated with teacher support to develop children's reading, writing, and abstract thinking in story reflection and sense of audience. Twenty-four first and second graders were paired for a 6-week partner reading and writing activity to provide peer social dialogue through partner storybook reading, discussion, and dialogue journal writing. A class mini-lesson on verbal story reflection added teacher support to the partner instructional activity. Data sources included student evaluations of their own classroom literacy performance and preferences, observational notes collected during the partner sessions, and students' dialogue journal entries. Students showed the most improvement in word recognition, minimal improvement in fluency, accurate evaluations of their own reading progress, and felt more positive about reading aloud. Students' journal entry writing progressed from copying their partners' statements to printed conversations about their stories. Teacher support influenced students' written dialogue and the strategies they used to share text meaning in verbal dialogue.

Husserl, Schutz, ?Paul? and me: Reflections on writing phenomenology

This paper is a reflection on the boundaries of academic discourse as I came to be acutely aware of them while attempting to teach a graduate seminar in qualitative research methods. The purpose of the readings in Husserl and Schutz and the writing exercises was to assist students trained in quantitative methods and steeped in positivistic assumptions about research to write phenomenological descriptions of lived experience. “Paul” could not write the assigned papers due to a diagnosed writing “disability” but he did submit fictional stories and sketches which beautifully illustrated the concepts of Husserl and Schutz. Paul's disability presented a natural “bracketing” experiment which brought the positivistic assumptions surrounding academic research and writing to the forefront. I engaged in verbal dialogues with Paul, in which he discussed the philosophical ideas. My work with Paul highlighted the extent to which the academic lifeworld marginalizes those who seek to write from the heart, disguising even the work of those philosophers who wish to uncover direct experiences. The “crisis” of the sciences is the loss of meaning for life. (Husserl, 1970: 5) I want to touch a person's heart. I don't want to just itemize things...that's why I write the way I do. — “Paul” The world, the physical as well as the sociocultural one, is experienced from the outset in terms of types: there are mountains, trees, birds, fishes, dogs, and among them Irish setters ... they belong to the prepredicative thinking. The vocabulary and the syntax of the vernacular of everyday language represent the epitome of the typfications socially approved by the linguistic group. (Schutz, 1970: 119–120) Schutz talked about how we have to live, approach the world according to how we experience it, what we know, I pushed it (Schutz may not want it pushed). My idea is that we don't really learn about life, or ourselves or meaning until we challenge the boundaries of our lifeworld and the kinds of typifications we live according to. When those boundaries are pushed we get an idea of the vastness of life. — Paul

A Practical Consideration: How many Words Do I Need? A Clinical Vignette

"Abstract: A single session with a bereaved fifteen year old client is presented, and the process of self-supenision is described. The session took place very early in the writer's Gestalt training experience and in a National Health Service setting. In particuIar, the difficulties the therapist experienced in establishing a verbal dialogue are considered. Key words: Self-supesvision, dialogue, contact, adolescence."

Communication in a chiropractic clinic: How A D.C. treats his patients

This study of a chiropractor and his patients represents the first interaction analysis of an alternative practitioner. Relationships between the types and quantities of communications in clinical exchanges and patient satisfaction with treatment are examined using both quantitative and qualitative analysis of verbal dialogue and clinical observations. Findings suggest that patient satisfaction is enhanced by a practitioner-patient relationship characterized by initial transmission of large amounts of comprehensible information successively supplanted by personal affective dialogue. New patients are usually unfamiliar with the chiropractic belief system and may have special communication needs due to the psychoemotional component to their, often chronic, problems. The chiropractor provides the patient with a structured, supportive environment and theoretical explanations designed to take the mystery out of process and problems. In essence, the chiropractor first manipulates a patient's belief structure before manipulating his or her physical structure, providing an analogous structural realignment in both the mind and body. Contrasts between biomedical and chiropractic clinical encounters are noted.

The Nonreciprocating Robot: Effects on Verbal Discourse, Social Play, and Social Referencing at Two Years of Age

2-year-old children interacted with a robot in a large playroom while their mother sat quietly in the corner. Identical vocalizations from the robot had very different effects on 3 dimensions of the children's behavior when the vocalizations were embedded in reciprocating and nonreciprocating social structures. The reciprocating robot produced (1) more topic-maintaining verbal dialogue, (2) less physical and more linguistically mediated social play, and (3) gender-specific effects on the children's tendency to visually reference their mother during the play session. The data are discussed with reference to the frequently encountered assumption that reciprocal social structures have an impact on children's behavior when the quantity and other qualitative dimensions of social stimulation are held constant, and with reference to the children's attributions about the robot as a social partner.

The Nonreciprocating Robot: Effects on Verbal Discourse, Social Play, and Social Referencing at Two Years of Age

2-year-old children interacted with a robot in a large playroom while their mother sat quietly in the corner. Identical vocalizations from the robot had very different effects on 3 dimensions of the children's behavior when the vocalizations were embedded in reciprocating and nonreciprocating social structures. The reciprocating robot produced (1) more topic-maintaining verbal dialogue, (2) less physical and more linguistically mediated social play, and (3) gender-specific effects on the children's tendency to visually reference their mother during the play session. The data are discussed with reference to the frequently encountered assumption that reciprocal social structures have an impact on children's behavior when the quantity and other qualitative dimensions of social stimulation are held constant, and with reference to the children's attributions about the robot as a social partner.

Impact of microcomputer simulation training on student-clinicians' ability to effectively intervene with preschool stutterers

A computer-based simulation was developed to train student-clinicians to use effective verbal techniques while intervening with preschool stutterers. This training vehicle allowed student-clinicians to maintain a verbal dialogue in real-time with a preschool stutterer whose voice-synthesized level of disfluency was directly tied to the participant's intervention effectiveness. Ten experimental and 10 control subjects completed a pre- and posttest therapy session with a computer-defined stutterer. The experimental subjects completed additional simulated therapy sessions, while control subjects coded and analyzed audiotaped segments of children's disfluency. All subjects then administered therapy to real preschool stutterers during a 10-min session. Results from the pre- and posttest simulation sessions revealed no significant differences between the groups on the pretest simulation and significant differences in the use of slow talk, positive feedback, interruptions, fast talk, negative feedback, and inappropriate questions during the posttest simulation. During intervention with real stutterers, the experimental subjects used significantly more effective intervention techniques (explain/describe, slow talk, positive feedback, model) and significantly fewer ineffective techniques (interrupt, fast talk, negative feedback, inappropriate questions, social interaction) than the control subjects.

A microcomputer simulation to evaluate and train effective intervention techniques in listening partners of preschool stutterers

A microcomputer-based simulation is being developed to assist parents and speech clinicians-in-training in intervening effectively with a stuttering child. The experience centers on the participant's maintenance of an active verbal dialogue with a computer-generated preschool stutterer whose speech-synthesized fluency level can be directly linked to the participant's verbal behavior. In an initial test of the system's evaluation efficacy, the intervention behaviors exhibited by a group of eight experienced speech pathologists were compared with those exhibited by a group of eight entry-level speech pathology students. The experienced group showed superior intervention particularly on rate-of-speech variables. Efforts are also focusing on increasing the system's coding sensitivity and on assessing its potential as a vehicle for the direct training of effective intervention skills.

Interviewing people with mental handicaps for the Community Aide Programme

SUMMARY. The Community Aide Programme is a new scheme in Britain designed to employ people with mild mental handicaps as paid assistants undertaking personal and domestic tasks for people with physical handicaps. The usual form of verbal dialogue is inappropriate when interviewing potential assistants. A new technique was used in a pilot scheme to help applicants participate constructively in interviews.

Microcomputer Support of Teacher-Pupil Dialogue

This article summarizes progress in developing a microcomputer-based simulation designed to offer students in teacher-training programs realistic experience in maintaining a verbal dialogue with software-defined pupils. Four system-related issues are discussed. These include 1) generating and communicating pupil questions and answers, 2) coding teacher actions to maximize behavioral sensitivity, 3) sequencing instructional aids during training, and 4) generating graphical and tabular displays for use during debriefing. Specific characteristics of modules designed to train feedback and pacing skills are discussed. A summary of participants' evaluations of the current simulation training is also presented. Finally, several anticipated future system enhancements are described.