Voice of God, Sound of Self

2020 ◽  
pp. 49-76
Author(s):  
Robert N. McCauley ◽  
George Graham
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Source Monitoring ◽  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Inner Speech ◽  
Cognitive Systems ◽  
Linguistic Processing ◽  
Thought Insertion ◽  
Religious Rituals ◽  
External Agents ◽  
The Voice

Humans are biologically evolved to identify sources of their own conscious experience and to distinguish between private inner speech and speech acts of external agents. So how are we to explain exceptions to our success in this capacity? How, in particular, can we account for hallucination of the voice of God? The chapter explores the question in detail. It distinguishes between hallucinations that result from religiously undomesticated breakdowns of source monitoring, in, say, schizophrenia, and those that are parts of culturally standard religious rituals and practices. The chapter identifies a range of cognitive systems that are connected with source monitoring and active in hallucination. These include, among others, theory of mind and linguistic processing systems. The chapter compares and contrasts hallucination of God’s voice with self-attribution of God’s thought in a delusion of thought insertion.

HALLUCINATIONS ARE ASSOCIATED WITH ABERRENT ACTIVATION IN INNER SPEECH REGIONS DURING SOURCE MONITORING

2008 ◽  
Vol 102 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd S. Woodward ◽  
Sara Weinstein ◽  
Tara A. Cairo ◽  
Paul Metzak ◽  
Elton T.C. Ngan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Source Monitoring ◽  
Inner Speech

The mediated voice

Target ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Biyu (Jade) Du
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Bound Constraints ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Pragmatic Equivalence ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Trial Participants

Abstract This article examines how the voices of trial participants are mediated by court interpreters. The research focuses on closing statements articulated by defendants in Chinese criminal trials, the last chance for their voices to be heard prior to sentencing. Drawing upon the concept of voice and theories of speech acts and pragmatic equivalence, and based on the discourse analysis of seven authentic trial recordings, this study reveals how the discursive performance of the defendant is constructed, altered, and sometimes undermined through interpreting. The findings reveal that speech acts performed by the defendant are often not maintained in the interpreted renditions and that the concept of closing statements is difficult to convey. It is argued that when interpreters fail to convey the pragmatic force of defendants’ utterances, the voice of the defendants is not fully heard, which places them at a disadvantage and impacts upon their right to equality and justice. The article also reveals system-bound constraints on the effective provision of language assistance and the safeguarding of defendants’ legal rights.

Affective modulation of external misattribution bias in source monitoring in schizophrenia

2008 ◽  
Vol 38 (6) ◽  
pp. 821-824 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. G. Costafreda ◽  
G. Brébion ◽  
P. Allen ◽  
P. K. McGuire ◽  
C. H. Y. Fu
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Bias ◽  
Source Monitoring ◽  
Emotional Valence ◽  
Positive Symptoms ◽  
Affective Modulation ◽  
External Agents ◽  
Schizophrenic Patients ◽  
The Subject

BackgroundSchizophrenic patients tend to attribute internal events to external agents, a bias that may be linked to positive symptoms. We investigated the effect of emotional valence on the cognitive bias.MethodMale schizophrenic subjects (n=30) and an experimenter alternatively produced neutral and negative words. The subject then decided whether he or the experimenter had generated the item.ResultsExternal misattributions were more common than self-misattributions, and the bias was greater for patients with active hallucinations and delusions relative to patients in remission. Actively psychotic patients but not patients in remission were more likely to generate external misattributions with negative relative to neutral words.ConclusionsAffective modulation of the externalizing cognitive bias in source monitoring is evident in patients with hallucinations and delusions.

scholarly journals TRUSTING SMART SPEAKERS: A TYPOLOGY OF INVOCATIONARY ACTS

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Chesher
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Smart Home ◽  
Speech Sound ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Psychological State ◽  
Text To Speech ◽  
Voice User ◽  
Factual Question ◽  
User Data ◽  
The Voice

Smart speakers such as the Google Home have the seemingly magical capacity to respond to user invocations in natural language. I argue that these are invocationary acts. In terms of Austin’s speech act theory, smart speakers interpret what the user says (locutionary: speech-to-text), what their statement does (illocutionary: artificial intelligence), and attempt fulfil the obligation of the user’s command (perlocutionary: AI & text-to-speech). The smart speaker responds with its own speech acts; in Searle’s terms it might assert facts (representatives: e.g. answering a factual question), ask the user to do something (directive, e.g. asking a question in a quiz game) communicate a psychological state (expressive: e.g. answering the question ‘Do you love me?’), commit to a future action (commissive: e.g setting a timer) or make a declaration (such as confirming a purchase). User invocations are most often directives, and are most often initiated with the ‘wake word’ ‘Hey Google’. The computer’s response comes automatically through what I call invocationary acts. In this case, the user’s invocation is answered by the evocation of synthesised speech, sound, music and/or images. Drawing on an analysis of 300 commands drawn from online publications, I developed a typology of invocationary acts: Search, Lookup, Error, Media, Third party search, Location, User data, Random, Scripted response (often randomly selected from multiple answers), Interaction (applications such as a tutorial or a game), Device (controlling media, or smart home devices) and Clock. This analysis points to the limitations of the voice user interface paradigm.

Inner Speech

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Production ◽  
Interpersonal Communication ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Inner Speech ◽  
Linguistic Expression ◽  
Auditory Verbal Hallucinations ◽  
Conceptual Thought ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Mental Events

Inner speech lies at the chaotic intersection of numerous difficult questions in contemporary philosophy and psychology. On the one hand, inner speech utterances are private mental events of a kind. On the other, they resemble speech acts of the sort used in interpersonal communication. Thought and its linguistic expression appear to overlap. Further, inner speech is at once imagistic in nature, having a characteristic auditory-verbal phenomenology; yet it also appears suitable to carrying complex linguistic contents. In another apparent clash, inner speech episodes seem to constitute or express sophisticated trains of conceptual thought; yet, at the same time, they are deeply motoric in nature, drawing on mechanisms for speech production and perception more generally. Also, in using inner speech, we seem able both to regulate our bodily actions and, arguably, to gain a unique kind of access to our own beliefs and desires. Finally, disorders as “thought insertion” and auditory verbal hallucinations are plausibly explicable in terms of the malfunctioning of mechanisms governing speech production and perception. But there is still little on what those mechanisms are, nor in how they might be involved. This interdisciplinary volume—comprising twelve chapters by philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists—capitalizes on growing interest in the many questions surrounding inner speech and presents a range of new theories concerning both its nature and location within these important debates.

Speech discrimination in the language-innocent and the language-wise: a study in the perception of voice onset time

1979 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca E. Eilers ◽  
Wesley R. Wilson ◽  
John M. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Categorical Perception ◽  
Voice Onset Time ◽  
Onset Time ◽  
English Learning ◽  
Speech Discrimination ◽  
Linguistic Processing ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Innateness Hypothesis ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Time Continuum

ABSTRACTDiscrimination of synthetically produced stimuli differing along the voice onset time continuum was assessed for infants and adults within the context of the Visually Reinforced Infant Speech Discrimination (VRISD) paradigm. English-learning infants' discrimination abilities were compared with two groups of English-speaking adults (a phonetically naive and a phonetically sophisticated group). Contrary to the predictions of the innateness hypothesis, English-learning infants showed evidence of discrimination only across the English phoneme boundary. Adults, on the other hand, were very successful in discriminating both across and within a range of phoneme boundaries. These results are discussed in terms of the presumed relationship between categorical perception and linguistic processing and in terms of synthetic speech continua.

The auditory hallucination: a phenomenological survey

1996 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony H. Nayani ◽  
Anthony S. David
Keyword(s):  
Psychotic Disorders ◽  
Auditory Hallucination ◽  
Auditory Hallucinations ◽  
Theoretical Development ◽  
Thought Insertion ◽  
Auditory Verbal Hallucination ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Structured Questionnaire

SynopsisA comprehensive semi-structured questionnaire was administered to 100 psychotic patients who had experienced auditory hallucinations. The aim was to extend the phenomenology of the hallucination into areas of both form and content and also to guide future theoretical development. All subjects heard ‘voices’ talking to or about them. The location of the voice, its characteristics and the nature of address were described. Precipitants and alleviating factors plus the effect of the hallucinations on the sufferer were identified. Other hallucinatory experiences, thought insertion and insight were examined for their inter-relationships. A pattern emerged of increasing complexity of the auditory–verbal hallucination over time by a process of accretion, with the addition of more voices and extended dialogues, and more intimacy between subject and voice. Such evolution seemed to relate to the lessening of distress and improved coping. These findings should inform both neurological and cognitive accounts of the pathogenesis of auditory hallucinations in psychotic disorders.

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