The Concepts of Aggressive Information Impact through the Lens of Internet Users’ Worldview Security

This article is devoted to the forensic analysis of the factors (cyberthreats) determining a negative information impact on recipients’ worldview in the Internet environment (changes in values, emotional perceptions, and expressions of will, etc.). Findings are founded on the concepts of deviant and delinquent speech behavior, the authors also outline definitions of criminogenic, aggressive, destructive, harmful, conflictogenic, and discrediting (defamatory) information and define the semantic field ‘destructiveness of information impact’. The research is based on an interdisciplinary legal and linguistic approach and uses methodology of information law (cyberlaw) and forensic speech science (forensic linguistics) for integral examination of aggressive information products (that are threatening worldview security of Internet communication) in several ways: 1) as speech actions related to law violations (verbal components that reflect actus reus of crimes, administrative offences, and civil torts); 2) as a result of communication activity; 3) as a source of forensically valuable information. The article covers such worldview security threats as defamation; libel; insult; propaganda of drugs, pornography, gambling, violence and cruelty, murder, autodestructiveness (including suicide), extremism (including terrorism); cyberbullicide; cybersuicide; cybergrooming; sexting; sex blackmail; doxing; outing; faking; astroturfing; cybertrolling; flaming; cyberbullying; cybermobbing; harassment; impersonation; exclusion (ostracism); stigmatization; cyberstalking; threats; hating; ‘happy slapping’, etc. The authors formulated the list of offenses, entailing the commitment of criminogenic and conflictogenic speech actions (in accordance with the current Russian civil, administrative and criminal legislation), as well as the list of types of information prohibited or restricted in distribution as harmful to the health and development of children (according to the current Russian legislation) are of urgent applied significance

German Pronunciation Database and its Possible Applications in the Age of Homeschooling

Orthoepie research is a traditional field at the department of Speech Science and Phonetics at Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg. After several pronunciation dictionaries, the department has now published a pronunciation database. With the establishment of the German pronunciation database (DAD), the desire for a publicly accessible reference source is met. It offers norm phonetic information on general vocabulary, as well as forms and rules of phonetical Germanization. The database can be used for various scenarios in German lessons. Continuous expansion means that further possible uses can be introduced in the future.

Lip movements enhance speech representations and effective connectivity in speech dorsal stream and its relationship with neurite architecture

Lip movements facilitate speech comprehension, especially under adverse listening conditions, but the neural mechanisms of this perceptual benefit at the phonemic and feature levels remain unclear. This fMRI study addresses this question by quantifying regional multivariate representation and network organization underlying audiovisual speech-in-noise perception. We found that valid lip movements enhanced neural representations of phoneme, place of articulation, or voicing feature of speech differentially in dorsal stream regions, including frontal speech motor areas and supramarginal gyrus. Such local changes were accompanied by strengthened dorsal stream effective connectivity. Moreover, the neurite orientation dispersion of left arcuate fasciculus, a structural basis of speech dorsal stream, predicted the visual enhancements of neural representations and effective connectivity. Our findings provide novel insight to speech science that lip movements promote both local phonemic and feature encoding and network connectivity in speech dorsal pathway and the functional enhancement is mediated by the microstructural architecture of the circuit.

The Challenges of Forensic Linguistic Analysis of False Testimony

The present paper arises from wider research which focused on various manifestations of destructive and malicious speech behavior in spontaneous oral or written dialogs, related to the processes of information concealment and falsification in police interviews and court testimonies. A number of analytical methods were used to generate this paper: a retrospective analysis of scientific literature, comparative legal and logical analysis, extrapolation methods, and content analysis. Despite numerous experimental researches devoted to acoustic-phonetic or psycholinguistic features of lies, their results are not sufficiently reliable for forensic purposes as the expert report should not rely on assumptions. The author disputes the evidence admissibility of experts’ conclusions about utterances implying speech parameters correlating with lies detected via psycholinguistic examination in oral speech audio or video recording of a police interview or a court testimony. Forensic psycholinguistic methods and comprehensive algorithms used in some forensic experts’ reports to detect speech signs of lying demonstrate a great variety that contradicts with the principals of evidence admissibility. The insufficient development of the currently used expert approach and the lack of a unified methodology for solving expert tasks on a strictly scientific basis creates a demand for developing comprehensive methods for studying lies on the basis of forensic speech science and cognitive theory.

FALKE: Experiences From Transdisciplinary Educational Research by Fourteen Disciplines

This article details how the FALKE research project (Fachspezifische Lehrerkompetenzen im Erklären; Engl.: subject-specific teacher competency in explaining) integrates 14 heterogeneous disciplines in order to empirically examine the didactic quality of teacher explanations in eleven school subjects by bringing together trans-, multi-, and interdisciplinary perspectives. In order to illustrate the academic landscape of the FALKE project we briefly outline the nature of the transdisciplinary German “Fachdidaktiken” (Engl.: subject-matter didactics, i.e., special academic disciplines of teaching and learning specific school subjects). The FALKE project required the willingness of all researchers from eleven participating subject-matter didactics to rely on both the concepts and the methods of educational sciences as an overarching research framework (transdisciplinary aspect). All researchers of subject-matter didactics had to develop a shared conceptual, methodological, and administrative framework in order to empirically investigate commonalities in and differences between “good explanations” across the range of school subjects represented (multidisciplinary aspect). The additional perspectives of researchers in speech science and linguistics proved fruitful in recognizing rhetorical and linguistic aspects of teacher explanations (interdisciplinary aspect). Data management and statistical analysis were provided by the discipline methods of educational sciences. Rather than reporting empirical results, we here discuss opportunities and challenges as well as the lessons learned from the FALKE project regarding cognitive-epistemic reasoning, communication, and organization.

Medien – Sprechen – Klang : Empirische Forschungen zum medienvermittelten Sprechen

This volume brings together empirical studies on language and speech as well as on their linkage with musical-sound elements in the media (radio, audio guide, audio book, radio play as well as YouTube and Instagram videos). The contributions are primarily concerned with auditory comprehensibility and sound aesthetics, with the medial target group and format specificity of radio genres and other media offerings, and with the speech effects of medial genres, also in cultural comparison. German and Russian news formats, standardized short moderations in several countries, gender constructions in double moderations of German radio primetime, soccer reports, audio guides for children, audio books read aloud and freely narrated, Instagram stories and Youtube educational videos, as well as hip-hop radio as educated radio will be examined. Ines Bose, Prof. Dr. phil. habil., is at the Department of Speech Science and Phonetics at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Clara Luise Finke, Dr. phil., is head of the Department of Speech Science at the University of Leipzig. Anna Schwenke, Dr. phil., works at the University of Greifswald as a research assistant in the German Department of the Elementary School Teacher Training Program.

Miteinander sprechen – verantwortlich, kompetent, reflektiert

Speech science has a history of over 120 years. In addition to the self-image of the discipline, this book focuses on everything that makes the subject so attractive: With its vital research and teaching subject, speaking and people talking to each other, it is both application-oriented and up-to-date. This explains the continuing high level of interest among students, research partners, and practical professional fields in education, art, media, counseling, therapy, and prevention. With study locations in Halle, Jena and Marburg, Speech Science is represented throughout Germany. As an interdisciplinary research and working subject with links to linguistics, medicine, pedagogy, psychology, politics and sociology, among others, there are also diverse collaborations in research, teaching and practice. This volume offers surprising insights into the diversity of speech science – from its history to the present to an outlook on what will be possible in the future. Susanne Voigt-Zimmermann holds a degree in speech science. After scientific, speech-educational, and clinical-therapeutic activities at the universities of Jena, Heidelberg, and Magdeburg, she has been a professor of speech science at the Department of Speech Science and Phonetics at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg since 2017.

Promoting Cultural and Linguistic Competence in Speech Science Courses

Purpose Speech conveys information about a speaker's identity—their age, gender, size, health, region of origin, language learning background, sexual orientation, and race—through a variety of acoustic cues. This review of the production and perception of extralinguistic information about speaker identity is intended to help instructors promote cultural and linguistic competence in basic anatomy and physiology, phonetics, and speech science courses through the understanding of indexical information in speech. Conclusions In assisting our students to recognize the anatomical/physiological and learned social and cultural speech features associated with the expression of personal identity, basic science instructors contribute to heightened awareness of listener expectations, stereotypes, and prejudices by future speech-language pathologists and audiologists so that they are better equipped to avoid misdiagnosis of speech differences and disorders, under referral or over referral of clients from vulnerable populations, and discriminatory practices leading to health disparities in clinical services and research.