Toward Empowering Conversational Agency in Aphasia: Understanding Mechanisms of Topic Initiation in People With and Without Aphasia

Purpose: This study examined topic initiation (TI) in conversations involving people with aphasia (PWA), matched people without aphasia (M-PWoA), and speech-language pathologists who were their conversation partners (SLP-Ps). For each speaker type, we analyzed patterns of distribution of typical mechanisms of TI and patterns of simultaneous use of multiple TI mechanisms. Lastly, we examined associations between use of simultaneous TI mechanisms and communicative success. Method: Twenty PWA and 20 M-PWoA each participated in two conversations with SLP-Ps. Conversation samples were analyzed for TI locations and mechanisms, with results tallied for each speaker type following a published typology. A measure of communicative success was applied to TI utterances. Rank-order correlations were conducted to evaluate the patterns of distribution of the TI mechanisms between speaker types and the patterns of multiple mechanism usage between speaker types. Descriptive analysis was conducted to provide additional insight to the TI behaviors of each speaker type and to evaluate the relationship between multiple TI mechanisms and communicative success. Results: All speaker types used cohesion most often to achieve TI. PWA used an abrupt method of TI (noncoherent TI) more often than other speaker types. A single mechanism of TI was used most often by all speaker types, except for SLP-Ps when they were in conversations with PWA. In this case, SLP-Ps most often used two or more layered mechanisms of TI. SLP-Ps also used a highly salient TI mechanism with greater frequency when speaking with PWA than observed between other speaker types. When PWA layered mechanisms of TI, they appeared to be more likely to achieve better communicative success. Conclusions: Specific, teachable behaviors such as favoring certain TI mechanisms and using multiple TI mechanisms may improve communicative success during TI for PWA. Furthermore, findings suggest that SLP-Ps modify their TI behaviors when speaking to PWA. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.17699423

Speech modifications in interactive speech: effects of age, sex and noise type

When attempting to maintain conversations in noisy communicative settings, talkers typically modify their speech to make themselves understood by the listener. In this study, we investigated the impact of background interference type and talker age on speech adaptations, vocal effort and communicative success. We measured speech acoustics (articulation rate, mid-frequency energy, fundamental frequency), vocal effort (correlation between mid-frequency energy and fundamental frequency) and task completion time in 114 participants aged 8–80 years carrying out an interactive problem-solving task in good and noisy listening conditions (quiet, non-speech noise, background speech). We found greater changes in fundamental frequency and mid-frequency energy in non-speech noise than in background speech and similar reductions in articulation rate in both. However, older participants (50+ years) increased vocal effort in both background interference types, whereas younger children (less than 13 years) increased vocal effort only in background speech. The presence of background interference did not lead to longer task completion times. These results suggest that when the background interference involves a higher cognitive load, as in the case of other speech of other talkers, children and older talkers need to exert more vocal effort to ensure successful communication. We discuss these findings within the communication effort framework. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)’.

STRATEGIES IN CONVEYING INFORMATION ABOUT UNSHARED EVENTS USING AIDED COMMUNICATION

Describing events may be challenging for any child, but children who use communication aids may face unique linguistic, pragmatic, and strategic challenges in conveying information with the communication means they have available. This study explores strategies used by young, aided communicators when describing the content of a video unknown to their communication partners. The participants of the study were 48 aided communicators (aged 5;3–15;2) from nine countries and seven language groups and their communication partners (parents, professionals, and peers) who used natural speech. Descriptive and statistical analyses were utilized to investigate the relationships between individual characteristics, linguistic and non-linguistic factors, linguistic strategies, and performance in conveying the content of the video event. Analyses of the 48 videotaped interactions revealed the use of a variety of linguistic elements and multimodal strategies, demonstrating both creativity and challenges. Success in relaying messages was significantly related to age, mode of communication, and individual profiles, such as everyday communication functioning and comprehension of grammar. Measures of receptive vocabulary and non-verbal reasoning were not significantly related to communicative success. The use of shared context and negotiation of meaning of potentially ambiguous utterances demonstrate the shared responsibility of disambiguation and meaning construction in interactions involving aided and naturally speaking communicators.

Lexical Alignment to Non-native Speakers

Two picture-matching-game experiments investigated if lexical-referential alignment to non-native speakers is enhanced by a desire to aid communicative success (by saying something the conversation partner can certainly understand), a form of audience design. In Experiment 1, a group of native speakers of British English that was not given evidence of their conversation partners’ picture-matching performance showed more alignment to non-native than to native speakers, while another group that was given such evidence aligned equivalently to the two types of speaker. Experiment 2, conducted with speakers of Castilian Spanish, replicated the greater alignment to non-native than native speakers without feedback. However, Experiment 2 also showed that production of grammatical errors by the confederate produced no additional increase of alignment even though making errors suggests lower communicative competence. We suggest that this pattern is consistent with another collaborative strategy, the desire to model correct usage. Together, these results support a role for audience design in alignment to non-native speakers in structured task-based dialogue, but one that is strategically deployed only when deemed necessary.

Assessing Language in Unstructured Conversation in People With Aphasia: Methods, Psychometric Integrity, Normative Data, and Comparison to a Structured Narrative Task

Purpose This study evaluated interrater reliability (IRR) and test–retest stability (TRTS) of seven linguistic measures (percent correct information units, relevance, subject–verb–[object], complete utterance, grammaticality, referential cohesion, global coherence), and communicative success in unstructured conversation and in a story narrative monologue (SNM) in persons with aphasia (PWAs) and matched participants without aphasia (M-PWoAs). Furthermore, the relationship of language in unstructured conversation and SNM was investigated for these measures. Methods Twenty PWAs and 20 M-PWoAs participated in two unstructured conversations on different days with different speech-language pathologists trained as social conversation partners. An 8- to 12-min segment of each conversation was analyzed. Additionally, a wordless picture book was used to elicit an SNM sample at each visit. Correlational analyses were conducted to address the primary research questions. Normative range and minimal detectable change data were also calculated for the measures in both conditions. Results IRR and TRTS were moderate to good for parametric measures and moderate to excellent for nonparametric measures for both groups, except for TRTS for referential cohesion for the PWAs in conversation. Furthermore, in PWAs, a strong correlation was demonstrated for three of eight measures across conditions. Moderate or weaker correlations were demonstrated for three of eight measures, and correlations for two of eight measures were not significant. An ancillary finding was no significant differences occurred for sample-to-sample variability between the two conditions for any measure. Conclusions This study replicates previous research demonstrating the feasibility to reliably measure language in unstructured conversation in PWAs. Furthermore, this study provides preliminary evidence that language production varies for some measures between unstructured conversation and SNM, contributing to a literature base that demonstrates language variation between different types of monologue. Thus, these findings suggest that inclusion of the specific types of discourse of interest to the PWA may be important for comprehensive assessment of aphasia. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16569360

Improvising on Emotion Terms: Students’ Strategies, Emotional Communication, and Aesthetic Value

Studies in musical improvisation show that musicians and even children are able to communicate intended emotions to listeners at will. To understand emotional expressivity in music as an art form, communicative success needs to be related to improvisers’ thought processes and listeners’ aesthetic judgments. In the present study, we used retrospective verbal protocols to address college music students’ strategies in improvisations based on emotion terms. We also subjected their improvisations to expert ratings in terms of heard emotional content and aesthetic value. A qualitative analysis showed that improvisers used both generative strategies (expressible in intramusical terms) and imaginative, extramusical strategies when approaching the improvisation tasks. The clarity of emotional communication was found to be high overall, and linear mixed-effects models showed that it was supported by generative approaches. However, perceived aesthetic value was unrelated to such emotional clarity. Instead, aesthetic value was associated with emotional complexity, here defined as the heard presence of “nonintended” emotions. The results point toward a view according to which the expressive content of improvisation gets specified and personalized during the very act of improvisation itself. Arguably, musical expressivity in improvisation should not be equated with the error-free communication of previously intended emotional categories.

Verstaanbaarheid als interactioneel en contextgebonden fenomeen

As a result of growing mobility and migration flows, the number of non-native speakers of Dutch in Belgium and the Netherlands have gradually increased over the past decades and so have the number of people enrolled in Dutch as a Second Language education. While there is huge variation in the profiles of these non-native speakers, they almost exclusively have in common that their Dutch sounds, in some way and at some stage, accented. In line with worldwide trends in foreign language teaching, the pronunciation goal in Dutch as a Second Language education has shifted from native-like to intelligible. Indeed, the notion of intelligibility has become prominent in language teaching and assessment. In this paper, we discuss the complexity of this notion and set it off against related terms like ‘comprehensibility’ and ‘foreign accent’. Through a literature review, we argue that intelligibility is an interactional and context-sensitive phenomenon: it is as much a responsibility of the speaker as it is of the listener or conversational partner(s) in general, whose attitudes will have an impact on the intelligibility and thus on the conversational flow and communicative success. After reviewing literature on the intelligibility of Dutch as a Second Language, we end by formulating some promising lines for future research.

IDEATION DISCOURSE: MEANS OF COMMUNICATIVE EFFECT ACHIEVEMENT (ON THE MATERIAL OF TED-PLATFORM)

Interactive aspects of communication include the following categories embodied in the metacommunicative elements of discourse, one of which is speech mode. The article focuses on pattern identification of communicative effect on the recipient by varying serious and humorous modes of the speech. The attention is paid to the identification of the initial strategies of communicative effect in both serious and humorous mode of English ideative speech. Communicative mode is an emotionally-stylistic communication format that occurs during the interaction between communicants and determines their changing attitudes and the choice of all means of communication. Serious mode orients the subjects of discourse to perceive communicative action as the one corresponding to norms. Humorous mode orients the subjects of discourse to perceive communicative action as the one inconsistent with norms. The paper gives results of inferential analysis of responsive actions on how successful the ideators’ speeches are according to the recipients’ instant and delayed responsive actions. The evaluation of communicative success has been conducted with the help of inferencial analysis of verbal and non-verbal actions of the audience taking into account instant and delayed responsive actions, in particular total number of the recording views, average monthly number of views; laughter, applause, cheers, murmur.

The Lienzo de Tlaxcala and the Indian Conquistadors

The conquest of Mexico can be better understood if one leaves aside the myths of European superiority and acknowledge the key role played by the Indigenous conquistadors in the defeat of the Mexica and later the formation of the realm of New Spain. Dozens of Mesoamerican polities, large and small, joined the victorious Indo-Spanish armies, and hundreds of thousands of Mesoamerican women, warriors, and assistants, participated in the twenty years of “Mesoamerican wars” that started with the war against México-Tenochtitlan, 1519–1521, and continued all across what is now Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua until the 1540s. The victorious Indigenous conquistadors produced legal testimonies and historical accounts of their feats of war to obtain rewards and privileges, often granted by the Spanish crown. The most spectacular were the lienzos, visual histories of the conquest painted on large cloths. There are many of these Indigenous accounts, but the best known and perhaps the most influential one is the Lienzo de Tlaxcala. It is the most complete account of the Mesoamerican wars, produced by the most important ally of the Spaniards, and it is also the foremost example of the historical and ritual discourses produced by the Indigenous conquistadors, as the ultimate proof of their leading role in this process. This spectacular artwork easily assimilated European pictorial conventions to the much more complex Amerindian pictographic and ritual narrative genres. As such, it was the anchor for complex ritual performances that re-enacted the feats of those wars and also allowed for the constitution of the Amerindian “complex beings” of Malinche and Santiago, the keystones of Tlaxcalan cultural memory of the conquest. Its communicative success can be proved by the fact that the Tlaxcalan embassies that presented the Lienzo de Tlaxcala and other historical books and precious gifts obtained the privileges they sought and asserted the autonomy of Tlaxcala.

STRATEGIC PLANNING OF A DOCTOR'S COMMUNICATION IN A SOCIAL NETWORK BASED ON THE COVID-19 INFORMATION OCCASION

Введение. Представлен коммуникативно-прагматический анализ медиакоммуникации врача в соцсети. Цель – выявить и описать способы реализации коммуникативных стратегий в медиатексте, созданном на основе информационного повода COVID-19. Материал и методы. Материалом выступили посты врачей о коронавирусе в Instagram. Анализ осуществляется при учете композиционной и смысловой целостности уровней стратегической вербальной коммуникации и поликодовых компонентов в медиатексте. Методика анализа стратегического планирования заключается в выявлении коммуникативных стратегий, определении их иерархической упорядоченности, описании номенклатуры и способов языковой репрезентации реализующих их тактик. Результаты и обсуждение. Медиатекст о COVID-19 позволяет врачу решить несколько стратегических задач: создание профессионального имиджа, просвещение массового адресата, формирование целевой аудитории блога. Основной стратегией является самопрезентационная, реализующаяся в коммуникативных тактиках апелляции к профессии (через образы «Я – врач», «Я – эксперт в области медицины», «Мы – медицинское сообщество»), актуализации преданности профессии, демонстрации преодоления профессиональных трудностей, передачи субъективной информации (через образы «Я – пациент» и «Я – личность»), а также невербальными способами (размещением фотографий врачей в условиях борьбы с COVID-19). Информационно-просветительская стратегия в текстах о коронавирусе становится вспомогательной и способствует реализации стратегии самопрезентации через обращение к тактикам дефиниции, краткой справки, инструкции, апелляции к авторитетным источникам, рекомендации, дискредитации медицинских мифов. Обнаруживается, что коммуникативный успех данных тактик достигается при их сочетании с самопрезентационными, а также при определенной последовательности их использования в одном медиасообщении. Вспомогательная стратегия вовлечения в диалог и удержания адресата, выполняя диалоговые и риторические функции, реализуется параллельно со самопрезентационной и информационно-просветительской стратегиями на уровне композиции медиатекста посредством вынесения в заголовок темы и изображения, отсылающего к COVID-19; реализации тактик анонсирования актуальной темы и апелляции к выгоде от прочтения текста во вступлении текста; использования в основной части тактик коммуникативного сближения, языковой оригинальности и ориентации на языковую моду; а также обращения в заключении к этикетной тактике и тактике приглашения к диалогу. Заключение. Реализация доминирующих стратегий медицинской медиакоммуникации осуществляется параллельно на разных уровнях медиатекста о коронавирусе, посредством использования вербальных и невербальных тактик персуазивного и суггестивного воздействия на аудиторию. Отмечается эффективность обращения к информационному поводу COVID-19 как инструменту стратегического планирования для достижения основной цели медиакоммуникации врача в соцсети – продвижения профессионального бренда. Introduction. The article presents a communicative and pragmatic analysis of the doctor’s media communication in the social network. Aim and objective. The aim of the article is to identify and describe the ways to implement communication strategies in a media text created on the basis of the news story COVID-19. Material and methods. The material was the doctor’s posts about the coronavirus on Instagram. The analysis is carried out taking into account the compositional and semantic integrity of the levels of strategic verbal communication and polycode components in the media text. The methodology for analyzing strategic planning consists in identifying communicative strategies, determining their hierarchical ordering, describing the nomenclature and methods of linguistic representation of the tactics that implement them. Results and discussion. The media text about COVID-19 allows the doctor to solve several strategic tasks: creating a professional image, educating the mass address, forming the target audience of the blog. The main strategy is selfpresentation, implemented in communicative tactics of appeal to the profession (through the images of «I am a doctor», «I am an expert in the field of medicine», «We are the medical community»), actualization of dedication to the profession, demonstration of overcoming professional difficulties, the transmission of subjective information (through the images «I am a patient» and «I am a person»), as well as non-verbal methods (posting photos of doctors in the fight against COVID-19). The information and educational strategy in the texts about the coronavirus becomes auxiliary and contributes to the implementation of the strategy of self-presentation through the appeal to the tactics of definition, brief information, instructions, appeals to authoritative sources, recommendations, discrediting medical myths. It is found that the communicative success of these tactics is achieved when they are combined with selfpresenting ones, as well as with a certain sequence of their use in one media communication. An auxiliary strategy for engaging and retaining the addressee, performing dialogue and rhetorical functions, is implemented in parallel with self-presentation and informational and educational strategies at the level of media text composition by placing a topic and image referring to COVID-19 in the title; implementation of tactics for announcing a topical topic and appealing to the benefits of reading the text in the introduction of the text; using in the main part of the tactics of communicative rapprochement, linguistic originality and orientation towards linguistic fashion; as well as appeals in the conclusion to etiquette tactics and tactics of invitation to dialogue. Conclusion. As a result of the analysis, it was found that the implementation of the dominant strategies of medical media communication is carried out in parallel at different levels of the media text about the coronavirus, through the use of verbal and non-verbal tactics of persuasive and suggestive influence on the audience. The effectiveness of referring to the information occasion of COVID-19 as a strategic planning tool to achieve the main goal of the doctor’s media communication in the social network – creating a professional brand.