scholarly journals Requests for Help in a Multilingual Professional Environment Testimonies and Actantial Models

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eve Lejot
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Complex Situation ◽  
Language Competence ◽  
Multilingual Communication ◽  
Professional Environment ◽  
Linguistic Input ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractProfessional multilingual environments using English as a lingua franca are prone to imbalances in communication, linguistic insecurity and rising tension. Non-native English speakers develop avoidance strategies in order to lessen their apprehension. To overcome these imbalances, this research aims to understand the relationships formed around languages focusing on the dynamics of integration and the requests for help. Guided by the actantial models of Greimas (1966), this qualitative study employs semiolinguistics and discourse analysis, including 19 narrative interviews with employees of Airbus and UNESCO in Hamburg, Germany in 2013. This methodology draws on actors connected through relationships of power and/or collaboration. The actantial models applied seek linguistic input through designational paradigms, shifters and modal occurrences. The actantial models illustrate how a good language competence provides a better understanding of one’s direct as well as passive environment. The learning process is shown to be a conduit to integration. The actantial model and discourse analysis shed light on the complex situation of multilingual communication settings by highlighting the influence of individuals’ linguistic skills. As a matter of fact, depending on the role of each individual in a given situation, lending a helping hand sometimes equates to upsetting the balance.

scholarly journals How much do visual cues help listeners in perceiving accented speech?

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-109
Author(s):  
YI ZHENG ◽  
ARTHUR G. SAMUEL
Keyword(s):  
Visual Information ◽  
Visual Cues ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Apparent Distance ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Accented Speech ◽  
Compressed Speech ◽  
Degraded Speech

AbstractIt has been documented that lipreading facilitates the understanding of difficult speech, such as noisy speech and time-compressed speech. However, relatively little work has addressed the role of visual information in perceiving accented speech, another type of difficult speech. In this study, we specifically focus on accented word recognition. One hundred forty-two native English speakers made lexical decision judgments on English words or nonwords produced by speakers with Mandarin Chinese accents. The stimuli were presented as either as videos that were of a relatively far speaker or as videos in which we zoomed in on the speaker’s head. Consistent with studies of degraded speech, listeners were more accurate at recognizing accented words when they saw lip movements from the closer apparent distance. The effect of apparent distance tended to be larger under nonoptimal conditions: when stimuli were nonwords than words, and when stimuli were produced by a speaker who had a relatively strong accent. However, we did not find any influence of listeners’ prior experience with Chinese accented speech, suggesting that cross-talker generalization is limited. The current study provides practical suggestions for effective communication between native and nonnative speakers: visual information is useful, and it is more useful in some circumstances than others.

scholarly journals Intonational effects on English scopally-ambiguous sentences

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 13-36
Author(s):  
Mien-Jen Wu ◽  
Tania Ionin
Keyword(s):  
Native English Speakers ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Universal Quantifier ◽  
Sentential Negation ◽  
Prior Literature ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Acceptability Judgment

This paper examines the effect of intonation contour on two types of scopally ambiguous constructions in English: configurations with a universal quantifier in subject position and sentential negation (e.g., Every horse didn’t jump) and configurations with quantifiers in both subject and object positions (e.g., A girl saw every boy). There is much prior literature on the relationship between the fall-rise intonation and availability of inverse scope with quantifier-negation configurations. The present study has two objectives: (1) to examine whether the role of intonation in facilitating inverse scope is restricted to this configuration, or whether it extends to double-quantifier configurations as well; and (2) to examine whether fall-rise intonation fully disambiguates the sentence, or only facilitates inverse scope. These questions were investigated experimentally, via an auditory acceptability judgment task, in which native English speakers rated the acceptability of auditorily presented sentences in contexts matching surface-scope vs. inverse-scope readings. The results provide evidence that fall-rise intonation facilitates the inverse-scope readings of English quantifier-negation configurations (supporting findings from prior literature), but not those of double-quantifier configurations.

scholarly journals Where the action could be: Speakers look at graspable objects and meaningful scene regions when describing potential actions

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gwendolyn L Rehrig ◽  
Candace Elise Peacock ◽  
Taylor Hayes ◽  
Fernanda Ferreira ◽  
John M. Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Visual Attention ◽  
Real World ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Linguistic Processing ◽  
General Meaning ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Better Than

The world is visually complex, yet we can efficiently describe it by extracting the information that is most relevant to convey. How do the properties of real-world scenes help us decide where to look and what to say? Image salience has been the dominant explanation for what drives visual attention and production as we describe displays, but new evidence shows scene meaning predicts attention better than image salience. Here we investigated the relevance of one aspect of meaning, graspability (the grasping interactions objects in the scene afford), given that affordances have been implicated in both visual and linguistic processing. We quantified image salience, meaning, and graspability for real-world scenes. In three eyetracking experiments, native English speakers described possible actions that could be carried out in a scene. We hypothesized that graspability would preferentially guide attention due to its task-relevance. In two experiments using stimuli from a previous study, meaning explained visual attention better than graspability or salience did, and graspability explained attention better than salience. In a third experiment we quantified image salience, meaning, graspability, and reach-weighted graspability for scenes that depicted reachable spaces containing graspable objects. Graspability and meaning explained attention equally well in the third experiment, and both explained attention better than salience. We conclude that speakers use object graspability to allocate attention to plan descriptions when scenes depict graspable objects within reach, and otherwise rely more on general meaning. The results shed light on what aspects of meaning guide attention during scene viewing in language production tasks.

TECHNICAL ENGLISH IN AEROSPACE

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-35
Author(s):  
Anton MATVEEV
Keyword(s):  
Language Proficiency ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
Civil Aviation ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
International Civil Aviation Organization ◽  
Teaching Approaches ◽  
Language Competence ◽  
Communication Problems ◽  
Air Traffic Controllers ◽  
Training Materials

Since 2004, the International Civil Aviation Organization has imposed pilots and air traffic controllers elsewhere in the world to comply with the established language proficiency standards as a safety measure against language and communication problems during flights. Currently, one of the problems that aviation English practitioners face is the lack of training materials on aviation specifications to learn various language aspects. This article discusses peculiarities of technical English used in aerospace. Thus, technical English not only facilitates communication between native and non-native English speakers but reduces the risk of errors and overall risks as well. In this regard, appropriate teaching approaches should be chosen, various tools and forms of teaching English aviation language should be used to form the language competence of future specialists.

Fillers, Repairs and Repetitions in the Conversations of Saudi English Speakers: Conversational Device or Disfluency Markers

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 193
Author(s):  
Yaseen A. Azi
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
The Other ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Normal Speaking

Based on the literature review, the three patterns (fillers, repairs and repetitions) in the conversations of the native English speakers are generally regarded as results of the normal speaking between people. On the other hand, the same patterns in the conversations of the L2 speakers are always seen as a marker of disfluency and linguistic disabilities of the nonnative speakers. Therefore, this study simply focuses on finding how the three disfluency patterns are used by the Saudi English speakers from different levels of fluency. The sampling of the study includes two groups of participants from different fluency levels. Through the transcriptions and the discourse analysis of one hour recoding of the two groups, the results showed that the three patterns (fillers, repairs and repetitions) should not be generally associated with disfluency. Instead, repetitions and self-repairs have been equally used by the two groups and such patterns can be used as a conversational device. However, the filler “uh” with longer pausing can clearly predict disfluency among the Saudi English speakers. 

scholarly journals What is an author now? Discourse analysis applied to the idea of an author

2015 ◽  
Vol 71 (5) ◽  
pp. 1094-1114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Martínez-Ávila ◽  
Richard Smiraglia ◽  
Hur-Li Lee ◽  
Melodie Fox
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Phenomenological Analysis ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Public ◽  
Intellectual Content ◽  
Shed Light

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss and shed light on the following questions: What is an author? Is it a person who writes? Or, is it, in information, an iconic taxonomic designation (some might say a “classification”) for a group of writings that are recognized by the public in some particular way? What does it mean when a search engine, or catalog, asks a user to enter the name of an author? And how does that accord with the manner in which the data have been entered in association with the names of the entities identified with the concept of authorship? Design/methodology/approach – The authors use several cases as bases of phenomenological discourse analysis, combining as best the authors can components of eidetic bracketing (a Husserlian technique for isolating noetic reduction) with Foucauldian discourse analysis. The two approaches are not sympathetic or together cogent, so the authors present them instead as alternative explanations alongside empirical evidence. In this way the authors are able to isolate components of iconic “authorship” and then subsequently engage them in discourse. Findings – An “author” is an iconic name associated with a class of works. An “author” is a role in public discourse between a set of works and the culture that consumes them. An “author” is a role in cultural sublimation, or a power broker in deabstemiation. An “author” is last, if ever, a person responsible for the intellectual content of a published work. The library catalog’s attribution of “author” is at odds with the Foucauldian discursive comprehension of the role of an “author.” Originality/value – One of the main assets of this paper is the combination of Foucauldian discourse analysis with phenomenological analysis for the study of the “author.” The authors turned to Foucauldian discourse analysis to discover the loci of power in the interactions of the public with the named authorial entities. The authors also looked to phenomenological analysis to consider the lived experience of users who encounter the same named authorial entities. The study of the “author” in this combined way facilitated the revelation of new aspects of the role of authorship in search engines and library catalogs.

scholarly journals Native English speakers learning Arabic: The influence of novel orthographic information on second language phonological acquisition

2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
CATHERINE E. SHOWALTER ◽  
RACHEL HAYES-HARB
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Word Learning ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Word Form ◽  
Phonological Acquisition ◽  
Talker Variability

ABSTRACTRecent research has indicated that learners exposed to second language words’ orthographic forms of words can often use this information to make inferences about the words’ phonological forms. Here we asked, do learners benefit even when the orthography is unfamiliar? We taught native English speakers minimal nonword pairs differentiated by the Arabic velar–uvular contrast (e.g., [kubu], [qubu]) and manipulated the quality of orthographic input. We found that participants were consistently unable to associate the novel phonemes with novel words. Results are discussed in terms of (a) the role of orthographic input in second language word form learning, (b) the influence of orthographic familiarity in moderating the role of orthographic input, and (c) the issue of talker variability in word learning.

scholarly journals The vocabulary of aviation radiotelephony communication in simulator emergencies and the contradictions in air traffic controller beliefs about language use

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jennifer Drayton
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
Air Traffic ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Plain Language ◽  
Emergency Training ◽  
Technical Vocabulary ◽  
Multiword Units ◽  
And Training

<p>This thesis encompasses a mixed methods enquiry into the language used in air traffic control in simulated emergency situations in the United Arab Emirates. The workplaces studied employ pilots and controllers from a diverse range of language backgrounds. This research sets out to answer three questions: 1. What is the technical vocabulary of aviation radiotelephony in emergency training in the simulator? 2. To what extent is technical vocabulary used in radiotelephony in emergency training in the simulator? 3. What factors influence the use of technical vocabulary in speaking? The first part of the study investigates the nature of technical language in aviation radiotelephony. Two spoken corpora were created from recordings of three air traffic controllers from two different workplaces (Ghaf and Sandy aerodromes), undergoing emergency simulator training. Mandated standard phraseology formed a written corpus. Standard phraseology is an international language defined by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and adopted by governments for use in radiotelephony communication. Quantitative analysis showed that the technical vocabulary in aviation radiotelephony consists of proper nouns, numbers, aviation alphabet, acronyms, technical word types and multiword units. The technical word types included purely technical words e.g. taxiway and cryptotechnical vocabulary (high, medium and low frequency words with a technical meaning (Fraser, 2009)) e.g. approach. Multiword units included ICAO standard phraseology e.g. hold short or subsidiary and local phraseology in the spoken corpora e.g. Do you have any question (subsidiary) and engine start approved (local).  The second part of the study examines sources of difference in language use by controllers. Technical vocabulary coverage differed between the spoken corpora at 70.52% for Ghaf Aerodrome and 51.61% for Sandy Aerodrome. Two explanations for this were: differences in the purpose of emergency training in each aerodrome; and differences in linguistic style by the Sandy controller which was established through keyword analysis. Interviews with nine controllers established further factors which are likely to affect the use of technical vocabulary in radiotelephony communication including: communication styles of native English speakers (NES) and non-native English speakers (NNES). Further examination of interview data also revealed contradictory beliefs underlying language use by controllers. Their beliefs diverge around the role of standard phraseology, its use (or not) in emergencies and the value of language training for emergencies. This divergence reflects the contradictions in definitions of standard phraseology and plain language in the literature. Differences in language use can lead to frequent miscommunication and the need for clarification of meaning in these UAE workplaces. The present study makes two contributions to the significant body of research on aviation radiotelephony. The first is an Aviation Radiotelephony Word and Number List. It is used to clarify the role of technical vocabulary and plain language in radiotelephony and to show how the technical vocabulary coverage of radiotelephony communication, in an extract from the simulator emergency training and another extract from an ICAO document, is high compared to other professions. Second, a Model of Controller Beliefs and Outcomes is presented and suggests a way to interpret divergent language outcomes in radiotelephony. The model summarises two contradictory sets of controller beliefs about standard phraseology, language in emergencies, and training. Further, the language and training outcomes reflect those beliefs. The investigation concludes with implications for training and testing in aviation for ab initio and experienced controllers. The corpora, word and number list and model all provide useful tools for the training and testing needs in these UAE workplaces. The chapter concludes with limitations of the study and future research directions.</p>

scholarly journals The Effects of L2 Experience and Vowel Context on the Perceptual Assimilation of English Fricatives by L2 Thai Learners

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patchanok Kitikanan
Keyword(s):  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Perceived Similarity ◽  
Language Experience ◽  
Sound System ◽  
Vowel Context ◽  
Thai Students ◽  
English Major ◽  
Back Vowel ◽  
Shed Light

The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of vowel context and language experience in the perceived similarity between L2 English fricatives and Thai sounds. The target English sounds being investigated were the sounds /v, f, w, θ, tʰ, s, ð, d, z, ʃ, t͡ʃ/. These sounds were elicited from four native English speakers in words in onset position and followed by three vowel contexts: high, low and back. Subjects were 54 Thai students divided into two groups: English-major and non-English-major. These Thai learners were asked to identify the sounds they heard with the Thai sounds that were closest in their perception. The findings showed that 1) all shared sounds were matched with the same L1 categories, suggesting that the existence of L2 sounds in the L1 sound system supports the perception; 2) most non-shared sounds, except English /θ/ were matched to Thai sounds that were suggested in previous literature; 3) the perceived similarity of English /θ/ and the L1 Thai sounds showed the effect of the vowel context in that this sound was mostly matched with Thai /f/ in the high and low vowel contexts whereas in the back vowel context, it was matched with Thai /s/; 4) the perceived similarities of both shared and non-shared sounds were affected by vowel context and language experience. The findings of this study shed light on the importance exploring perceived similarities and differences in the phonetic level rather than the phonological one.

The role of acoustic cues in the development of (non-)target-like second-language prosodic representations

2010 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-114
Author(s):  
Annie Tremblay ◽  
Nathan Owens
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Acoustic Cues ◽  
Canadian French ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Primary Word ◽  
Heavy Syllable ◽  
Stress Patterns

AbstractThis study investigates the acquisition of English (primary) word stress by native speakers of Canadian French, with focus on the trochaic foot and the alignment of its head with heavy syllables. L2 learners and native English speakers produced disyllabic and trisyllabic nonsense nouns. The participants with consistent stress patterns were grouped according to their prosodic grammar, and their productions were analyzed acoustically. The results indicate that the L2 learners who failed to align the head of the trochaic foot with the heavy syllable realized stress with higher pitch. Conversely, the L2 learners who aligned the head of the trochaic foot with the heavy syllable realized non-initial stress by lengthening the syllable. Surprisingly, the native speakers produced higher pitch on the initial syllable irrespective of stress, and they used length to realize stress oh the heavy syllable. These findings suggest that L2 learners may have reached different prosodic grammars as a result of attending to distinct acoustic cues to English stress.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document