A Computer-Assisted Writing Tool for an Extended Variety of Leichte Sprache (Easy-to-Read German)

Leichte Sprache (LS; easy-to-read German) defines a variety of German characterized by simplified syntactic constructions and a small vocabulary. It provides barrier-free information for a wide spectrum of people with cognitive impairments, learning difficulties, and/or a low level of literacy in the German language. The levels of difficulty of a range of syntactic constructions were systematically evaluated with LS readers as part of the recent LeiSA project (Bock, 2019). That study identified a number of constructions that were evaluated as being easy to comprehend but which fell beyond the definition of LS. We therefore want to broaden the scope of LS to include further constructions that LS readers can easily manage and that they might find useful for putting their thoughts into words. For constructions not considered in the LeiSA study, we performed a comparative treebank study of constructions attested to in a collection of 245 LS documents from a variety of sources. Employing the treebanks TüBa-D/S (also called VERBMOBIL) and TüBa-D/Z, we compared the frequency of such constructions in those texts with their incidence in spoken and written German sources produced without the explicit goal of facilitating comprehensibility. The resulting extension is called Extended Leichte Sprache (ELS). To date, text in LS has generally been produced by authors proficient in standard German. In order to enable text production by LS readers themselves, we developed a computational linguistic system, dubbed ExtendedEasyTalk. This system supports LS readers in formulating grammatically correct and semantically coherent texts covering constructions in ELS. This paper outlines the principal components: (1) a natural-language paraphrase generator that supports fast and correct text production while taking readership-design aspects into account, and (2) explicit coherence specifications based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to express the communicative function of sentences. The system’s writing-workshop mode controls the options in (1) and (2). Mandatory questions generated by the system aim to teach the user when and how to consider audience-design concepts. Accordingly, users are trained in text production in a similar way to elementary school students, who also tend to omit audience-design cues. Importantly, we illustrate in this paper how to make the dialogues of these components intuitive and easy to use to avoid overtaxing the user. We also report the results of our evaluation of the software with different user groups.

Ta as an emergent language practice of audience design in CMC

This study examines the use of ungendered third person Chinese pronoun ta in digital first-and-third person voiced discourses (i.e. small stories). The study asks what implications the script choice ta, as opposed to gendered 他 ta ‘he’ and 她 ta ‘she’, has for audience design and the facilitation of character empathy. The study draws on 131 digital texts from celebrity verified accounts on social media platform Sina Weibo in October 2015. From a Discourse Analytical perspective focused on deixis relative to the notion of empathy in storytelling, the study investigates emergent practices which involve the orthographic manipulation of gender. The study proposes that ta is an interpersonal resource whose deictic properties as a non-standard spelling are exploited as a property of audience design to facilitate an appeal to empathy. This facilitation is advanced by the script choice which offers a wider scope of reference, and thus targets a wider audience.

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.

Breaking the Norms of Bulgarian Language Online: Language Adaptation or Language Illiteracy

The purpose of the research was to explore the experiences of Bulgarian university students, representatives of generations Y and Z, with breaking the rules of the Standard of Bulgarian language when communicating with textual posts on the Facebook social network site (SNS) and social networking applications (apps). Breaking language norms is due to the perception of the SNS and social apps communication as speaking rather than writing. Therefore, many of the language rules applicable to the writing are broken. The research employed a phenomenological inductive research strategy. It used a narrative literature review from 2011 to 2021 and an in-depth interview of 15 university students as research instruments. The theoretical framework was built on the theory of communication accommodation and audience design. Two main themes crystallized in the in-depth interviews: 1) communication in SNS and social apps – visual, verbal, and informal and 2) context and communicator determine the level of the Bulgarian language rules observance. In these themes, perceiving SNS communication as speaking, not as writing, hurrying up to join the communication, and the perception of the online environment as informal, explained the breaking the language rules. The research is the first to study the issue in the context of the experiences of the language users, and it opens the scientific field to further research.

Testing for Audience Design: a short report

In this short report, we present the results from a novel test set-up, aiming to track the practice of Audience Design (AD) in the reference production of Swedish speaking 7 year olds. AD is the conduct of altering one's communicative signal with the receiver of the signal in mind, so that they can easily infer its intended meaning. The results show a distinctive group that does not adapt production in the same manner as in a practice trial prompt for a third party without shared frame of mind. While we controlled for the participant’s knowledge of the referential objects of the test, we did not control for the participants assumptions about the world knowledge of the different addresses, which might have altered the result.

Age-related differences in how speakers relay news in face-threatening contexts

Following recent work on pragmatics and ageing, this study investigates how adults of different ages relay bad news in face-threatening situations. Three factors were manipulated between subjects: the recipient (whether or not they were affected by the news), the severity of the news, and whether or not the news was health-related. Participants (N=280; ages 18-89) delivered bad news both through open-ended responses and by selecting probability terms from multiple choice. Responses were coded for indirectness, uncertainty and emotion, and supported our initial predictions: younger adults were more sensitive to the recipient manipulation than older adults, while both age groups adjusted their speech similarly depending on the severity of the news. Older adults engaged in more face saving when the number of health scenarios increased, although they did not switch strategy across scenarios. Our results are consistent with previous evidence that younger adults are better at audience design than older adults. However, we also found that these skills are partially context-dependent, and could vary due to life circumstances and different communicative strategies at different ages.

Language choices as audience design strategies in Chinese multilingual speakers’ Wechat posts

This current study reports three multilingual Chinese students’ audience design strategies on a populated Social Networking Site (SNS), WeChat. Considering the importance of audiences in shaping multilingual speakers’ language choice (Bell, A. (1984). Language style as audience design. Language in Society, 13(2), 145–204) and the potential hazard of conflated audiences in social media, as well as the comparative lack of research on Wechat which has different technical affordances from the well-researched SNS, Facebook, this article aims to shed new light on how multilingual speakers harness their linguistic repertoire to cope with the “context collapse” (Marwick, A. E., & Boyd, D. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114–133) in semi-public SNS. Data collection and analysis follow an online ethnography method consisting of 588 initial posts from participants’ WeChat Moments during 1 year and semi-structured interviews. Theoretically informed by Androutsopoulos’s (2014b; Languaging when contexts collapse: Audience design in social networking. Discourse, Context & Media, 4–5, 62–73) audience specification framework, the findings reveal that although the default language in both online and offline interactions is Chinese, Wechat users have a very high sensitivity to different patterns of Chinese–English code-switching and grammatical and lexical choices in English. Meanwhile, Chinese multilingual speakers usually developed highly nuanced audience design strategies to target or partition specific groups of audience, which are far more complicated than the audience design strategies found in previous research on Facebook.

Measuring Collaboration Load With Pupillary Responses - Implications for the Design of Instructions in Task-Oriented HRI

In face-to-face interaction, speakers establish common ground incrementally, the mutual belief of understanding. Instead of constructing “one-shot” complete utterances, speakers tend to package pieces of information in smaller fragments (what Clark calls “installments”). The aim of this paper was to investigate how speakers' fragmented construction of utterances affect the cognitive load of the conversational partners during utterance production and comprehension. In a collaborative furniture assembly, participants instructed each other how to build an IKEA stool. Pupil diameter was measured as an outcome of effort and cognitive processing in the collaborative task. Pupillometry data and eye-gaze behaviour indicated that more cognitive resources were required by speakers to construct fragmented rather than non-fragmented utterances. Such construction of utterances by audience design was associated with higher cognitive load for speakers. We also found that listeners' cognitive resources were decreased in each new speaker utterance, suggesting that speakers' efforts in the fragmented construction of utterances were successful to resolve ambiguities. The results indicated that speaking in fragments is beneficial for minimising collaboration load, however, adapting to listeners is a demanding task. We discuss implications for future empirical research on the design of task-oriented human-robot interactions, and how assistive social robots may benefit from the production of fragmented instructions.

“The people watching at home”

This paper explores disagreement practice in political discourse, specifically in the under explored public inquiry communicative event and more specifically in the select-committee hearing. We revisit earlier work on theorising disagreement to expand our understanding of its contextual nature, particularly in relation to the making of ideology. Public inquiries combine the characteristics of professional meetings with characteristics of political discourse. They are typified by hybridised and ambiguous role expectations which participants negotiate in and through (potentially competing) practices in doing the ideological work demanded by the policy process. In this context, disagreement emerges as expected and key to the performance of the interactants’ situated and explicit/semi-permanent roles as professional politicians. By applying Critical Interactional Sociolinguistic analysis within a wider frame of audience design, we demonstrate the importance of the ideological role of disagreement to the policy process. We argue that further attention needs to be given to the policy talk in meso-level political events, such as the public inquiry, which connect the ideological (macro) political domains of human activity with the (micro) here and now of talk. We close the paper with directions for further research.

“It is natural, really deaf signing” – script development for fictional programmes involving sign languages

Historically, fictional productions which use sign language have often begun with scripts that use the written version of a spoken language. This can be a challenge for deaf actors as they must translate the written word to a performed sign language text. Here, we explore script development in Small World, a television comedy which attempted to avoid this challenge by using improvisation to create their script. The creators framed this process as a response to what they saw as “inauthentic” sign language use on television, foregrounding the need to present “natural signing” on the screen. According to them, “natural signing” is not influenced by an English script but is varied language use that reflect a character’s background, their settings, and the characters that they interact with. We describe how this authentic language use is derived primarily from improvisation and is in competition with other demands, which are textual (e.g., the need to ensure comedic value), studio-based (e.g., operating within the practical confines of the studio), or related to audience design (e.g., the need to ensure comprehensibility). We discuss how the creative team negotiated the tension between the quest for authentic language use and characteristics of the genre, medium, and audience.