Psycholinguistics: Competence and Performance

1976 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 79-90
Author(s):  
Judith Greene
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Linguistic Context ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Verbal Cues ◽  
Linguistic Communication ◽  
Linguistic Structure ◽  
Dinner Party ◽  
Standing Up ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Linguistics

There has been a tendency, natural perhaps in such ‘verbal’ disciplines as philosophy and linguistics, to assume that language and communication are the same thing. But while no one would deny that language is one powerful medium of human communication, is it the only one? Is there any real distinction between communicating one's desire to leave a dinner party by making verbal remarks like, ‘I must go’ or ‘We could only get Jane as a babysitter’, as opposed to fidgeting, standing up and looking longingly towards the door? As Michael Argyle argues, a great deal of information is conveyed by non-verbal cues. To take the argument a step further, are even verbal statements examples of purely linguistic communication ? Whereas the manifest linguistic content of ‘I must go’ is obvious to anyone who speaks English, the meaning of the remark about the babysitter can only be understood by those who know the particular neighbourhood social context in which it was uttered. Does it make sense, then, to try and analyse the linguistic structure and content of an utterance without taking into account the use to which it is being put in a particular extra-linguistic context?

Verbal Cues and Attentional Focus: A Simulated Target-Shooting Experiment

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 148-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louisa D. Raisbeck ◽  
Jed A. Diekfuss
Keyword(s):  
Attentional Focus ◽  
Focus Of Attention ◽  
Verbal Cues ◽  
Task Load ◽  
External Focus ◽  
Gun Barrel ◽  
Internal Focus ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Nasa Task Load Index ◽  
Learning And Performance

Performance benefits exist for an external focus of attention compared with an internal focus of attention for performance and learning (Wulf, 2013). It is unknown, however, if varying the number of verbal cues affects learning and performance. Focus of attention and the number of verbal cues were manipulated during a simulated handgun-shooting task. For the internal focus conditions, participants were told to focus on their hand, arm, and wrist, whereas the external focus instructions were to focus on the gun, gun barrel, and gun stock. To manipulate the number of verbal cues, participants received instruction to focus on a single verbal cue or multiple verbal cues. Shooting performance was assessed at baseline, acquisition, and at two separate retention phases (immediate, delayed) that included transfer tests. Participants completed the NASA—Task Load Index to assess workload following all trials. Participants who received one verbal cue performed significantly better during immediate retention than those who received three verbal cues. Participants who used external focus of attention instructions had higher performance and reported less workload at delayed retention compared to those who used internal focus instructions. This research provides further support for the benefits of an external focus and highlights the importance of minimizing the number of verbal cues.

The tough Westerner

2021 ◽  
pp. 127-146
Author(s):  
Gillian Kelly
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Real Life ◽  
World War ◽  
Career Trajectory ◽  
Performance Style ◽  
Major Curve ◽  
Star Image ◽  
And Performance

This chapter explores Power’s work within the Western genre. When Power was cast in the title role of Hollywood’s first ‘A Western’ of the 1930s: Jesse James (Henry King) in 1939 it marked the first major curve in Power’s career trajectory. When it became Twentieth Century-Fox’s biggest hit of the year this proved that audiences were ready to accept Power in more masculine roles at the close of the decade. Released in the period directly preceding America’s entry into World War II, the film was integral in developing a much-needed shift in Power’s screen masculinity, appearance and performance style, reflecting the shifting industrial and social context in which it was made. In advancing his star image away from a womaniser, and instead placing it within an overtly homosocial environment, Power was able to convincingly demonstrate male bonding and leadership through a tougher masculinity which was essential for both the historical timeframe and Power’s own upcoming real-life war service. Despite the film’s huge success, it was another 12 years before Power starred in another Western, and made just four in overall: Jesse James, Rawhide (Henry Hathaway, 1951), Pony Soldier (Joseph M. Newman, 1952) and The Mississippi Gambler (Rudolph Maté, 1953).

Usage events and utterance types

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-28
Author(s):  
Hans-Jörg Schmid
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Sensory Activities ◽  
And Linguistics

The chapter lays the foundation for the understanding of usage events and utterance types. Usage events consist of several components, all of which can become conventionalized and entrenched: utterances (including the required motor and sensory activities), communicative goals of participants, cognitive and interpersonal activities, and the linguistic, situational, and social context. Utterance types are contingent links between communicative goals and linguistics forms. They are contingent on several dimensions: the onomasiological link between goals and forms, the semasiological link between forms and meanings, combinations on the syntagmatic dimension, and the use of utterance types in cotexts and contexts. Utterance types can be defined as multiply contingent and probabilistic connections between goals and forms. Three classes of utterance types can be distinguished with regard to their function, specificity, and size, i.e. distinctors, units, and patterns. Although the notion of utterance types is similar to that of construction, it is preferred to emphasize the dynamic and contingent nature of form-meaning relations.

The Normativity of Meaning Revisited

2019 ◽  
pp. 295-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-Johann Glock
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Evolution Of Language ◽  
Different Dimensions ◽  
Correct Application ◽  
Linguistic Behaviour ◽  
Normativity Of Meaning ◽  
Semantic Normativity ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
Normative Status

The question of whether meaning is inherently normative has become a central topic in philosophy and linguistics. It also has crucial implications for anthropology and for understanding the evolution of language. This chapter defends the normativity of meaning against some recent challenges. Anti-normativists contend that while there are “semantic principles”—aka explanations of meaning—specifying conditions for the correct application of expressions, these are either not genuinely normative or they are not in fact constitutive of meaning. This dilemma can be defused if one clarifies the notions of norm, rule, and convention, distinguishes different dimensions of semantic normativity, and pays attention to different types of mistakes that can afflict linguistic behaviour. One needs to keep apart: norms of truth and of meaning, regulative and constitutive rules, rules and the reasons for following or disregarding them, pro tanto and all things considered obligations. On that basis the chapter argues that correctness is a normative notion and that constitutive rules in general and explanations of meaning in particular play various normative roles in linguistic practices. Furthermore, while speakers may conform to and occasionally violate semantic principle for defeasible prudential reasons, this is perfectly compatible with the principles having a normative status. The final section discusses the question of whether human communication requires communally shared rules or conventions and the age-old problem of circularity: how could such conventions be essential to language, given that the latter appears prerequisite for establishing and communicating conventions in the first place?

scholarly journals Expressing Robot Personality through Talking Body Language

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 4639
Author(s):  
Unai Zabala ◽  
Igor Rodriguez ◽  
José María Martínez-Otzeta ◽  
Elena Lazkano
Keyword(s):  
Humanoid Robot ◽  
Body Language ◽  
Social Robots ◽  
Social Robot ◽  
Body Posture ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Verbal Cues ◽  
Emotional Cues ◽  
Human Interactions ◽  
Rich Variety

Social robots must master the nuances of human communication as a mean to convey an effective message and generate trust. It is well-known that non-verbal cues are very important in human interactions, and therefore a social robot should produce a body language coherent with its discourse. In this work, we report on a system that endows a humanoid robot with the ability to adapt its body language according to the sentiment of its speech. A combination of talking beat gestures with emotional cues such as eye lightings, body posture of voice intonation and volume permits a rich variety of behaviors. The developed approach is not purely reactive, and it easily allows to assign a kind of personality to the robot. We present several videos with the robot in two different scenarios, and showing discrete and histrionic personalities.

The Place of Structure in Communication

1976 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 91-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy C. Potts
Keyword(s):  
Human Communication ◽  
Linguistic Communication

In this lecture, I want to convey some ideas about linguistic communication which will probably be found not only unfamiliar, but also difficult to grasp at a first encounter. Perhaps I am being too ambitious in so short a compass. At any rate, my only hope of success is to work within closely defined limits, to concentrate more upon expounding these suggestions than upon detailed justification of them, and to say as little as possible about the shortcomings of alternative proposals which are current. The references which I cite have also been rather narrowly selected. As to the limits of this discussion, it will be confined to linguistic communication, as effected by the use of sentences. This is not to deny that there are non-linguistic forms of communication, both between men and between other animals, nor that there are other units of linguistic communication than the sentence; I have taken only what seems most typical of human communication, in order to make the task manageable.

scholarly journals Dopamine neurons change their tuning according to courtship context in singing birds

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vikram Gadagkar ◽  
Pavel A. Puzerey ◽  
Jesse H. Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Courtship Song ◽  
Dopamine Neurons ◽  
Evaluation Systems ◽  
Self Evaluation ◽  
Opportunities For Learning ◽  
Performance Error ◽  
And Performance

Attending to mistakes while practicing alone provides opportunities for learning1, 2, but self-evaluation during audience-directed performance could distract from ongoing execution3. It remains unknown how animals switch between practice and performance modes, and how evaluation systems process errors across distinct performance contexts. We recorded from striatal-projecting dopamine (DA) neurons as male songbirds transitioned from singing alone to singing female-directed courtship song. In the presence of the female, singing-related performance error signals were reduced or gated off and DA neurons were instead phasically activated by female vocalizations. Mesostriatal DA neurons can thus dynamically change their tuning with changes in social context.

scholarly journals Talking Past Each Other - Staff and Student Reflection in Undergraduate Software Projects

10.28945/2850 ◽  
2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stewart Fleming
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Software Engineering ◽  
Engineering Education ◽  
Group Work ◽  
Software Projects ◽  
Flexible Approach ◽  
Student Reflection ◽  
Software Engineering Education ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Performance

Group projects are an important part of Software Engineering education. However, conflicts that arise from group work can affect overall class learning and performance. It can be difficult for teachers to fully understand the social context of these issues. We explore the nature of self, peer and staff reflection to identify and mediate issues within a class. We have used a protocol that encourages reflection to explore conflicts that arise from group work in a Software Engineering course. We have found a way to explore and mediate student impressions and expectations and to identify conflicts with staff expectations and course objectives. We present a lightweight and flexible approach for such investigations.

Rajend Mesthrie (ed.), Concise encyclopedia of sociolinguistics. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001. Pp. xxvii, 1031. Hb $237.

2003 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 579-582
Author(s):  
Dan Beckett
Keyword(s):  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Language Study ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
Important Branch ◽  
Mixed Languages

Mesthrie's Concise encyclopedia of sociolinguistics (hereafter, CESO) is a newly edited, condensed, and updated offshoot of the Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, originally published in ten volumes in 1993. This laudable volume aims to “give a comprehensive overview of the main topics in an important branch of language study, generally known as Sociolinguistics” (p. 1). As theoretical background, the branch is traced from the Sanskrit scholar Pānini to more recent origins in historical linguistics, anthropology, rural dialectology, and the study of mixed languages. The field is further presented as the most proper of all branches for language study today, as Mesthrie – updating Labov's (1972) famous claim about the implications of the term sociolinguistics – writes that “having ‘human communication’ as part of the definition of language makes it impossible to study language comprehensively without due regard to social contexts of speech” (1). CESO is an attempt to catalog the relevant components of those social contexts.

Email B2B sales negotiation : dynamic use of textual cues as influence tactics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Sunil Kumar Singh
Keyword(s):  
Information Sharing ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Influence Tactics ◽  
Sales Managers ◽  
Verbal Cues ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
Contract Negotiations ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
The University

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] In this dissertation, I develop measures for sales influence tactics based on verbal cues and examine their joint effectiveness on sales outcomes - buyer attention and contract award - during email B2B sales negotiations. To test the proposed conceptual framework, I use a field and a controlled setting. In the field study, I collect email data for 43 B2B sales contract negotiations conducted over the course of 2.5 years based on a retrospective, 360-degree capture of emails centered on the lead salespersons and buyers. The email data are augmented with in-depth interviews of sales managers and a survey to collect salespersons' perceptual, demographic and performance information. Results demonstrate that combinations of motivationally synergistic tactics such as promise and assertiveness as well as recommendation and information sharing not only draw buyer's attention but also allow salespersons to win contracts. On the contrary, motivationally distinct tactics, such as promise and information sharing, can have unintended consequences. The study also finds support for buyer's attention role as a mediator between sales influence tactics and contract award. In the controlled setting (100 B2B Buyers/Procurement specialists as respondents), I test the underlying mechanisms (compliance, internalization) for two key influence tactics (promise and recommendation). Results offer support for the promise tactic working through a compliance mechanism. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

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