Teasing apart listener-sensitivity

Gesture ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-97
Author(s):  
Prakaiwan Vajrabhaya ◽  
Eric Pederson

Abstract Using a repetition paradigm, in which speakers describe the same event to a sequence of listeners, we analyze the degree of reduction in representational gestures. We find that when listener feedback, both verbal and non-verbal, is minimal and unvarying, speakers steadily reduce their motoric commitment in repeated gestures across tellings without regard to the novelty of the information to the listener. Within this specific condition, we interpret the result to coincide with the view that gestures primarily serve as a part of speech production rather than a communicative act. Importantly, we propose that gestural sensitivity to the listener derives from an interaction between interlocutors, rather than simple modeling of the listener’s state of knowledge in the mind of the speaker alone.

Communicology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-52
Author(s):  
E. V. Koydan

The paper examines the historical connection of phonetics with general linguistics, and reveals why this area of linguistics did not develop neither consistently, nor simultaneously in the structure of philological sciences. Attention is paid to the modern media-text approach to such an area of phonetics as intonation; the latter, in turn, is viewed as part of communication theory. It is hypothesized that such an attitude to sound, to the phoneme, has already been considered among the Futurists, Dadaists, Lettrists, Budelyans and Oberiuts, who interpreted sounds as an unknowable phenomenon that is beyond the cognition of the mind. Here the place and the pragmatic role of modern science on current approaches to phonetics in communicology is determined, where intonation does not refer to either cognitive science or paralinguistics, but, at the same time, unites these two areas of practical speech production. It is hypothetically assumed that such approaches were realized by some representatives of trends and schools of the direction of modernism of the early twentieth century.


Gesture ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Peter de Ruiter

In this paper, I compare three different assumptions about the relationship between speech, thought and gesture. These assumptions have profound consequences for theories about the representations and processing involved in gesture and speech production. I associate these assumptions with three simplified processing architectures. In the Window Architecture, gesture provides us with a ‘window into the mind’. In the Language Architecture, properties of language have an influence on gesture. In the Postcard Architecture, gesture and speech are planned by a single process to become one multimodal message. The popular Window Architecture is based on the assumption that gestures come, as it were, straight out of the mind. I argue that during the creation of overt imagistic gestures, many processes, especially those related to (a) recipient design, and (b) effects of language structure, cause an observable gesture to be very different from the original thought that it expresses. The Language Architecture and the Postcard Architecture differ from the Window Architecture in that they both incorporate a central component which plans gesture and speech together, however they differ from each other in the way they align gesture and speech. The Postcard Architecture assumes that the process creating a multimodal message involving both gesture and speech has access to the concepts that are available in speech, while the Language Architecture relies on interprocess communication to resolve potential conflicts between the content of gesture and speech.


Gesture ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulf Liszkowski

This paper investigates the social-cognitive and motivational complexities underlying prelinguistic infants’ gestural communication. With regard to deictic referential gestures, new and recent experimental evidence shows that infant pointing is a complex communicative act based on social-cognitive skills and cooperative motives. With regard to infant representational gestures, findings suggest the need to re-interpret these gestures as initially non-symbolic gestural social acts. Based on the available empirical evidence, the paper argues that deictic referential communication emerges as a foundation of human communication first in gestures, already before language. Representational symbolic communication, instead, emerges as a transformation of deictic communication first in the vocal modality and, perhaps, in gestures through non-symbolic, socially situated routines.


The article analyses interpretation of the category of addressee in the scientific literature, presents the specifics of the linguistic representation of polite addressee in the Ukrainian language. The features of the category of addressee and its linguistic representation from the point of sociolinguistic criteria view are described. Polite addressing is considered as a set of special linguistic indicators that represent communicative interaction, a certain instrument of influencing the addressee, which are sometimes more effective than communication itself. In addition, the emphasis is made on sociolinguistic, national and cultural features of the category of addressees. Polite addressee is regarded as a certain pragmatic vector that determines and regulates the strategy of the speaker's communicative behaviour, influencing the choice and use of language indicators, the specifics of linguistic means of expressing polite addressee use. Linguistic indicators of polite addressee, which are used by the speaker in order to establish a successful communicative act are highlighted and described. The category of addressee is not limited to implementation within one part of speech, since the addressee expressiveness is concentrated in pronouns, nouns and verbs that can name or indicate the addressee, thus the category of addressee is a cross-cutting category inherent not only to one part of speech. The main specialized grammatical indicators of polite addressee expression in the Ukrainian language are personal pronouns ти, Ви, addressee-personal verb forms, vocative case of nouns, imperative verbs, words of the addressee category (vocative and addressee intensifiers dear, respected, etc.), in which the addressee is lexicalized function. From the point of polite addressing view, speakers use a number of linguistic indicators that perform an appellative, phatic, regulatory, connotative, national-cultural function, pragmatically loaded and modally labelled to represent relationships. The authors claim that functional load of a polite addressee is to prepare the conditions for successful implementation of a communicative act. The semantics of the addressee is determined by speech contact, relationship between the communicants, communication situation and the speaker's intention.


2020 ◽  
pp. 45-58
Author(s):  
Oleksandr Ishchenko ◽  

The study analyzes speech pauses of Ukrainian. The research material is the audio texts of spontaneous conversational speech of customarily pronunciation and intonation, as well as non-spontaneous (read) speech of clear pronunciation and expressive intonation. We show a robust tendency for high frequency of pauses after nouns. It suggests that pausing is like a predictor of nouns. The frequency of pausing after verbs is slightly lower. The probability of pause location after any another part of speech is much lower. Generally, pausing can be occurred after words of any grammatical category. These findings spread virtually equally to both spontaneous conversational speech and non-spontaneous speech (clear intonated reading). The effect of nouns on pause occurrence may be caused by universal property of the human language. It is recently accepted that nouns slow down speech across structurally and culturally diverse languages. This is because nouns load cognitive processes of the speech production planning more as compared with verbs and other parts. At the same time, some Ukrainian language features also impact the pausing after nouns (these features are characteristic of other Slavic languages too). This is about a prosodic phrasing of Ukrainian according to that interpausal utterances usually are finalized by nouns (rarely by verbs or other principal parts of speech) which get most semantic load. The pauses do not follow after each noun, because they can be exploited in the speech segmentation in depends on linguistic (linguistic structure of speech), physiological (individuality of speech production, breathing), and psycholingual factors. We suggest that the priming effect as a noun- and verb-inducted psycholingual factor can significantly impact pausing in spoken language. Statistical measures show the following: 430 ms ±60% is the average pause duration of non-spontaneous clear expressive speech, 355 ms ±50% is the average pause duration of spontaneous customarily speech. Thus, pauses of non-spontaneous speech have a longer duration than of spontaneous speech. This is indicated by both the average pause duration means (ms) and the relative standard deviation of pause durations (±%). Keywords: expressive speech, spontaneous speech, phonetics, prosody, speech pauses, pausing, prepausal words, nouns, verbs.


2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 42-49
Author(s):  
Autumn Hostetter ◽  
Elina Mainela-Arnold

Representational gestures are hand and arm movements that are related to the semantic content of co-occurring speech. In this review, we present evidence that such movements not only provide insight into the knowledge possessed by a speaker, but also provide insight into how that knowledge is represented. Specifically, gestures often occur with the communication of information that is understood spatially or motorically but that has not yet been verbally or linguistically encoded. Using gesture to convey such information can have a number of benefits for speakers, including facilitation of speech production processes and reduction of cognitive load. We focus our review on evidence from individual differences in gesture production among both typical and clinical populations, and conclude with a few recommendations for language therapists who are interested in using gesture as a tool in their practice.


2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sotaro Kita ◽  
Ingeborg van Gijn ◽  
Harry van der Hulst

Since Battison (1978), it has been noted in many signed languages that the Symmetry Condition constrains the form of two-handed signs in which two hands move independently. The Condition states that the form features (e.g., the handshapes and movements) of the two hands are ‘symmetrical’. The Symmetry Condition has been regarded in the literature as a part of signed language phonology. In this study, we examine the linguistic status of the Symmetry Condition by comparing the degree of symmetry in signs from Sign Language of the Netherlands and speech-accompanying representational gestures produced by Dutch speakers. Like signed language, such gestures use hand movements to express concepts, but they do not constitute a linguistic system in their own right. We found that the Symmetry Condition holds equally well for signs and spontaneous gestures. This indicates that this condition is a general cognitive constraint, rather than a constraint specific to language. We suggest that the Symmetry Condition is a manifestation of the mind having one active ‘mental articulator’ when expressing a concept with hand movements.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 101
Author(s):  
Fernando Simões Antunes Junior ◽  
Ernani Cesar De Freitas

O presente estudo pretende estabelecer, de forma transversal e exploratória, interfaces entre alguns fundamentos teóricos da comunicação, da neurociência e da análise de discurso. A intenção é compreender como construtos simbólicos da propaganda de alimentos se utilizam de estratégias discursivas para eliciar emoções e anular processos empáticos de forma a induzir e/ou favorecer o consumo de carne e seus derivados. Tal análise se justifica a partir de estudos recentes que mostram a importância das emoções e da empatia na formação de crenças, comportamentos e hábitos de consumo. A partir da análise de peças publicitárias produzidas pelas marcas Sadia, Seara e Friboi, e com base em descobertas recentes da neurociência, assume-se neste estudo que o processo empático é o primeiro estágio do ato comunicativo, que está ligado à capacidade de reconhecer estados emotivos no outro a partir de referências universais (inatas) e aprendidas (condicionadas). O marco teórico é constituído por pressupostos de Charaudeau (2004, 2016), Damásio (2000/2012), Ekman (2011), Krznaric (2015), Jung (1991/2011), entre outros, que vão ajudar na elaboração de circuitos que explicam a função das emoções na ativação e/ou anulação do processo empático por meio do ato de linguagem e do discurso na comunicação publicitária. Com isto, busca-se demonstrar a capacidade de manifestar e de perceber o sentir através da linguagem, de maneira a interferir na organização da mente, tanto em seus processamentos conscientes quanto inconscientes, afetando a cognição, o aprendizado e os hábitos de consumo.Palavras-chave: Comunicação. Discurso. Emoções. Empatia. Consumo. ABSTRACTThe present study aims to establish, in a transversal and exploratory way, interfaces between some theoretical foundations of communication, neuroscience and discourse analysis. The intention is to understand how symbolic constructs of food advertising use discursive strategies to elicit emotions and negate empathic processes in order to induce and / or favor the consumption of meat and its derivatives. This analysis is justified by recent studies that show the importance of emotions and empathy in the formation of beliefs, behaviors and consumption habits. Based on the analysis of advertising pieces produced by the brands Sadia, Seara and Friboi, and based on recent discoveries of neuroscience, it is assumed in this study that the empathic process is the first stage of the communicative act, which is linked to the ability to recognize states Emotional in the other from universal (innate) and learned (conditioned) references. The theoretical framework is constituted by the assumptions of Charaudeau (2004, 2016), Damásio (2000/2012), Ekman (2011), Krznaric (2015), Jung, among others,that will help in the elaboration of circuits that explain the function of the emotions in the activation and / or annulment of the empathic process through the act of language and the discourse in the advertising communication. In this way, the aim is to demonstrate the ability to express and perceive feeling through language, so as to interfere in the organization of the mind, both in its conscious and unconscious processes, affecting cognition, learning and consumption habits.Keywords: Communication. Speech. Emotions. Empathy. Consumption.


2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter DeScioli

AbstractThe target article by Boyer & Petersen (B&P) contributes a vital message: that people have folk economic theories that shape their thoughts and behavior in the marketplace. This message is all the more important because, in the history of economic thought, Homo economicus was increasingly stripped of mental capacities. Intuitive theories can help restore the mind of Homo economicus.


1992 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan G. Kamhi

My response to Fey’s article (1985; reprinted 1992, this issue) focuses on the confusion caused by the application of simplistic phonological definitions and models to the assessment and treatment of children with speech delays. In addition to having no explanatory adequacy, such definitions/models lead either to assessment and treatment procedures that are similarly focused or to procedures that have no clear logical ties to the models with which they supposedly are linked. Narrowly focused models and definitions also usually include no mention of speech production processes. Bemoaning this state of affairs, I attempt to show why it is important for clinicians to embrace broad-based models of phonological disorders that have some explanatory value. Such models are consistent with assessment procedures that are comprehensive in nature and treatment procedures that focus on linguistic, as well as motoric, aspects of speech.


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