“Stirring it up!” Emotionality in audience responses to political speeches

Speaker-audience interaction in political speeches has been conceptualised as a form of dialogue between speaker and audience. Of particular importance is research pioneered by Atkinson (e.g., 1983, 1984a, 1984b) on the analysis of rhetorical devices utilised by politicians to invite audience applause. Atkinson was not concerned with emotionalisation in political speech-making, rather with how applause was invited in relation to group identities through ingroup praise and/or outgroup derogation. However, his theory has provided important insights into how speakers invite audience responses, and a powerful stimulus for associated research. The purpose of this article is to address the shortfall of emotionalisation research within the realm of political speeches. We begin with an account of Atkinsons influential theory of rhetoric, followed by a relevant critique. The focus then turns to our main aim, namely, how key findings from previous speech research can be interpreted in terms of emotionalisation. Specifically, the focus is on audience responses to the words of political speakers, and how different forms of response may reflect audience emotionality. It is proposed that both duration and frequency of invited affiliative audience responses may indicate more positive emotional audience responses, while uninvited interruptive audience applause and booing may provide notable clues to issues on which audiences have strong feelings. It is concluded that there is strong evidence that both invited and uninvited audience responses may provide important clues to emotionalisation - both positive and negative - in political speeches.

Vocal communication across cultures: theoretical and methodological issues

The study of human vocal communication has been conducted primarily in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic (WEIRD) societies. Recently, cross-cultural investigations in several domains of voice research have been expanding into more diverse populations. Theoretically, it is important to understand how universals and cultural variations interact in vocal production and perception, but cross-cultural voice research presents many methodological challenges. Experimental methods typically used in WEIRD societies are often not possible to implement in many populations such as rural, small-scale societies. Moreover, theoretical and methodological issues are often unnecessarily intertwined. Here, I focus on three areas of cross-cultural voice modulation research: (i) vocal signalling of formidability and dominance, (ii) vocal emotions, and (iii) production and perception of infant-directed speech. Research in these specific areas illustrates challenges that apply more generally across the human behavioural sciences but also reveals promise as we develop our understanding of the evolution of human communication. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)’.

LINGUISTIC CORRELATION OF PRIMARY TEXT AND ITS VERBAL REPRODUCTION IN THE INTERROGATION PROTOCOL

Problem statement. The article deals with the problem of modern linguo-expert activity related to the use of interrogation protocols as a material carrier of negative-evaluative information about a person. The variability of expert views regarding the possibility of analyzing someone else’s speech in the interrogation protocol more and more often entails the lack of expert assessment of the materi-als of the preliminary investigation in criminal cases. The purpose of the study is to establish the nature of the relationship and the degree of approxi-mation of the primary and secondary texts, where the primary text is recorded on the phonogram, the secondary one is reproduced in the interrogation protocol from the words of the interrogated. The research methodology consists of theoretical approaches to the comparative analysis of the prototypical utterance and its secondary form. The material of the research is video and audio recordings of speech events of insult, as well as interrogation protocols, the descriptive part of which contains information about the recorded conflict speech. Research results. The study showed the maximum degree of formal-semantic affinity of the texts serving as the basis and their verbal reproductions, reflected in the interrogation protocols. The inter-rogation protocol also reproduces important paralinguistic characteristics of the voice of the person to whom the invective evaluative statements belong. Conclusions. The results obtained in the course of the study can be used in developing guidelines for experts involved in the analysis of speech material extracted from the interrogation protocol, as well as other indirect sources of information about expert objects. The proposed system of under-standing broadens understanding of secondary texts as objects of research within the framework of forensic linguistic expertise.

Phonetic-Lexical Tools and Ways of Translation in Kyz Daryika Poem

Research relevance in this study, according to Kadyrkul Alimanov, phonetic and phonological means of translating the Kyz Daryika poem into other languages is the phonetic harmony in poetic speech. Research purposes: using phonetic and lexical means, and determine the structure of the place in the sentence, function, place in the sentence and comprehensively identify their features in order to attract the reader’s attention. Research materials and methods: in this work, phono-stylistic means used not only in the organization of rhythm and rhyme, but also in the poetic category, organizing aesthetic impact and melodiousness in Kyrgyz poetry, both folklore and professional written literature, were considered. Research results: Translation is important both for introduction with life, culture and history of other people as well as in the process of exchanging with their literary and scientific achievements. Conclusions: Translation contributes to the development of people culture, to emergence of all-round communication and simultaneously performing social function in language when connecting with other peoples.

A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF COHESIVE SPEECH RESEARCH OF PRESCHOOLERS FROM 1970 TO 2020

Cohesive speech has commonly become regarded as one of the essential aspects of language development, especially for pre-schoolers. This study aimed to shed light on the cohesive speech of pre-schoolers (CSP) knowledge base. Three hundred ninety-five publications close related cohesive speech research of 5-6-year-old children were collected from the Scopus database. By using the bibliometric approach, the results showed the growth rate of publications over time from 1970 to 2020. In this period, the top five countries, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil and France, have published over 60% of total documents. Besides, four main interests of authors in this field were discovered: “language development”, “speech pathology outcomes”, “speech therapy”, “language intervention”. Among these themes, “speech pathology outcomes” was the most relevant one. Another finding, in recent years, scholars focused on aspects of autism spectrum disorder of pre-schoolers. More importantly, the achievements of this discipline have considerably made positive contributions to various fields both in terms of theory and practice, especially in language and linguistics, speech and hearing, psychology, and medicine. Overall, these studies highlight the need for many other studies, particularly relevant to pre-schooling when new generations should be better prepared to be happy in school by their future cognitive developments. Keywords: language development, language intervention, speech pathology outcomes, speech therapy

ADVANCING THE STATE OF THE ART IN L2 SPEECH PERCEPTION-PRODUCTION RESEARCH: REVISITING THEORETICAL ASSUMPTIONS AND METHODOLOGICAL PRACTICES

One of the basic goals of second language (L2) speech research is to understand the perception-production link, or the relationship between L2 speech perception and L2 speech production. Although many studies have examined the link, they have done so with strikingly different conceptual foci and methods. Even studies that appear to use similar perception and production tasks often present nontrivial differences in task characteristics and implementation. This conceptual and methodological variation makes meaningful synthesis of perception-production findings difficult, and it also complicates the process of developing new perception-production models that specifically address how the link changes throughout L2 learning. In this study, we scrutinize theoretical and methodological issues in perception-production research and offer recommendations for advancing theory and practice in this domain. We focus on L2 sound learning because most work in the area has focused on segmental contrasts.

DOING L2 SPEECH RESEARCH ONLINE: WHY AND HOW TO COLLECT ONLINE RATINGS DATA

Listener-based ratings have become a prominent means of defining second language (L2) users’ global speaking ability. In most cases, local listeners are recruited to evaluate speech samples in person. However, in many teaching and research contexts, recruiting local listeners may not be possible or advisable. The goal of this study was to hone a reliable method of recruiting listeners to evaluate L2 speech samples online through Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) using a blocked rating design. Three groups of listeners were recruited: local laboratory raters and two AMT groups, one inclusive of the dialects to which L2 speakers had been exposed and another inclusive of a variety of dialects. Reliability was assessed using intraclass correlation coefficients, Rasch models, and mixed-effects models. Results indicate that online ratings can be highly reliable as long as appropriate quality control measures are adopted. The method and results can guide future work with online samples.

BEYOND LINGUISTIC FEATURES

Comprehensibility, or ease of understanding, has emerged as an important construct in second language (L2) speech research. Many studies have examined the linguistic features that underlie this construct, but there has been limited work on behavioral and affective predictors. The goal of this study was therefore to examine the extent to which anxiety and collaborativeness predict interlocutors’ perception of one another’s comprehensibility. Twenty dyads of L2 English speakers completed three interactive tasks. Throughout their 17-minute interaction, they were periodically asked to evaluate their own and each other’s anxiety and collaborativeness and to rate their partner’s comprehensibility using 100-point scales. Mixed-effects models showed that partner anxiety and collaborativeness predicted comprehensibility, but the relative importance of each predictor depended on the nature of the task. Self-collaborativeness was also related to comprehensibility. These findings suggest that comprehensibility is sensitive to a range of linguistic, behavioral, and affective influences.

Constituent order in silent gesture reflects the perspective of the producer

Understanding the relationship between human cognition and linguistic structure is a central theme in language evolution research. Numerous studies have investigated this question using the silent gesture paradigm in which participants describe events using only gesture and no speech. Research using this paradigm has found that Agent–Patient–Action (APV) is the most commonly produced gesture order, regardless of the producer’s native language. However, studies have uncovered a range of factors that influence ordering preferences. One such factor is salience, which has been suggested as a key determiner of word order. Specifically, humans, who are typically agents, are more salient than inanimate objects, so tend to be mentioned first. In this study, we investigated the role of salience in more detail and asked whether manipulating the salience of a human agent would modulate the tendency to express humans before objects. We found, first, that APV was less common than expected based on previous literature. Secondly, salience influenced the relative ordering of the patient and action, but not the agent and patient. For events involving a non-salient agent, participants typically expressed the patient before the action and vice versa for salient agents. Thirdly, participants typically omitted non-salient agents from their descriptions. We present details of a novel computational solution that infers the orders participants would have produced had they expressed all three constituents on every trial. Our analysis showed that events involving salient agents tended to elicit AVP; those involving a non-salient agent were typically described with APV, modulated by a strong tendency to omit the agent. We argue that these findings provide evidence that the effect of salience is realized through its effect on the perspective from which a producer frames an event.