Understanding speaker attitudes from prosody by adults with Parkinson's disease

The ability to interpret vocal (prosodic) cues during social interactions can be disrupted by Parkinson's disease, with notable effects on how emotions are understood from speech. This study investigated whether PD patients who have emotional prosody deficits exhibit further difficulties decoding the attitude of a speaker from prosody. Vocally inflected but semantically nonsensical ‘pseudo‐utterances’ were presented to listener groups with and without PD in two separate rating tasks. Task 1 required participants to rate how confident a speaker sounded from their voice and Task 2 required listeners to rate how polite the speaker sounded for a comparable set of pseudo‐utterances. The results showed that PD patients were significantly less able than HC participants to use prosodic cues to differentiate intended levels of speaker confidence in speech, although the patients could accurately detect the polite/impolite attitude of the speaker from prosody in most cases. Our data suggest that many PD patients fail to use vocal cues to effectively infer a speaker's emotions as well as certain attitudes in speech such as confidence, consistent with the idea that the basal ganglia play a role in the meaningful processing of prosodic sequences in spoken language ( Pell & Leonard, 2003 ).     

Le LECPC version 1.1 : un logiciel d’étude de la compréhension du langage non littéral chez l’enfant

The purpose of this article is to present a new computerized system for studying nonliteral language comprehension in children: LECPC version 1.1, devoted more specifically to the understanding of indirect requests and idiomatic expressions. Nonliteral language exists when there is a difference between what a speaker says and the meaning he/she intends to transmit to the listener (e.g., saying “It's cold” to mean “Close the door”). In nonliteral language, the interaction context is crucial to understanding. LECPC version 1.1 is a methodological tool that can be used to incorporate the interaction situation into the study of language comprehension, in accordance with the requirements of experimental research. It is based on a story-completion paradigm, and looks and functions like a computer game. The system is well-suited to very young children, and is also applicable to a wide range of ages.     

Intention, interpretation and the computational structure of language

I show how a conversational process that takes simple, intuitively meaningful steps may be understood as a sophisticated computation that derives the richly detailed, complex representations implicit in our knowledge of language. To develop the account, I argue that natural language is structured in a way that lets us formalize grammatical knowledge precisely in terms of rich primitives of interpretation. Primitives of interpretation can be correctly viewed intentionally, as explanations of our choices of linguistic actions; the model therefore fits our intuitions about meaning in conversation. Nevertheless, interpretations for complex utterances can be built from these primitives by simple operations of grammatical derivation. In bridging analyses of meaning at semantic and symbol-processing levels, this account underscores the fundamental place for computation in the cognitive science of language use.     

Exploiting Listener Gaze to Improve Situated Communication in Dynamic Virtual Environments

Beyond the observation that both speakers and listeners rapidly inspect the visual targets of referring expressions, it has been argued that such gaze may constitute part of the communicative signal. In this study, we investigate whether a speaker may, in principle, exploit listener gaze to improve communicative success. In the context of a virtual environment where listeners follow computer‐generated instructions, we provide two kinds of support for this claim. First, we show that listener gaze provides a reliable real‐time index of understanding even in dynamic and complex environments, and on a per‐utterance basis. Second, we show that a language generation system that uses listener gaze to provide rapid feedback improves overall task performance in comparison with two systems that do not use gaze. Aside from demonstrating the utility of listener gaze in situated communication, our findings open the door to new methods for developing and evaluating multi‐modal models of situated interaction.     

Markers of Topical Discourse in Child‐Directed Speech

Although the language we encounter is typically embedded in rich discourse contexts, many existing models of processing focus largely on phenomena that occur sentence‐internally. Similarly, most work on children's language learning does not consider how information can accumulate as a discourse progresses. Research in pragmatics, however, points to ways in which each subsequent utterance provides new opportunities for listeners to infer speaker meaning. Such inferences allow the listener to build up a representation of the speakers' intended topic and more generally to identify relationships, structures, and messages that extend across multiple utterances. We address this issue by analyzing a video corpus of child–caregiver interactions. We use topic continuity as an index of discourse structure, examining how caregivers introduce and discuss objects across utterances. For the analysis, utterances are grouped into topical discourse sequences using three annotation strategies: raw annotations of speakers' referents, the output of a model that groups utterances based on those annotations, and the judgments of human coders. We analyze how the lexical, syntactic, and social properties of caregiver–child interaction change over the course of a sequence of topically related utterances. Our findings suggest that many cues used to signal topicality in adult discourse are also available in child‐directed speech.     

Swimming and Speaking Spanish

The dominant view of the status of knowledge of language is that it is theoretical or what Gilbert Ryle called knowledge-that. Defenders of this thesis may differ among themselves over the precise nature of the knowledge which underlies language, as for example, Michael Dummett and Noam Chomsky differ over the issue of unconscious knowledge; however, they all agree that acquisition, understanding and use of language require that the speaker have access to a theory of language. In this paper, I argue that this view is mistaken. Knowledge of language is properly seen as practical knowledge, knowledge-how. My target is Michael Dummett’s treatment of theory of meaning in The Seas of Language. If my argument goes through, underlying assumptions about the nature of cognition as computational must be adjusted to allow for other forms of knowledge, which are arguably more basic, and which underlie knowledge-that.     

Action Attenuates the Effect of Visibility on Gesture Rates

Much evidence suggests that semantic characteristics of a message (e.g., the extent to which the message evokes thoughts of spatial or motor properties) and social characteristics of a speaking situation (e.g., whether there is a listener who can see the speaker) both influence how much speakers gesture. However, the Gesture as Simulated Action (GSA) framework (Hostetter & Alibali, 2008 ) predicts that these effects should not be independent but should interact such that the effect of visibility is lessened when a message evokes strong thoughts of action. This study tested this claim by comparing the gesture rates produced by speakers as they described 24 nouns that vary in how strongly they evoke thoughts of action. Further, half of the words were described with visibility between speaker and listener blocked. The results demonstrated a significant interaction as predicted by the GSA framework.     

Mothers' control strategies in dyadic mother/child conversations

Conversations combine the exchange of messages with the interchange of the speaker/ listener role. These discourse features were reflected differentially in the language used by mothers and children engaged in dyadic play situations. Differences in the speech patterns of the mothers and children indicated the type of reciprocity engendered by the mothers' social and didactic control strategies. Mothers tended to ensure the maintenance of the conversation and the interchange of the speaker/listener role. The children showed a stronger interest in topic in various ways. The interval of 12 months between the two recording sessions produced certain changes in discourse patterns. These included a decline in the tendency to initiate new topics, and a move toward greater cohesiveness was postulated. Relationships between aspects of mothers' and children's speech were also examined.Some of the work reported in this article was undertaken while the author was in receipt of a postdoctoral award from the Social Science Research Council, London.     

Facilitating referential communication among children: The listener as teacher

This study was designed to test the hypothesis that systematic variations in listener behavior can have an important influence on both speaker behavior and communicative success among children. In particular, we investigated the idea that systematic variations in listener behavior might have not only within-trial effects on the adequacy of speakers' messages and the accuracy of communication among children, but also cumulative effects on speakers' initial messages across trials. Effects of stimulus complexity were also examined. Pairs of 7- and 9-year-old children participated in a referential communication game, with the younger child serving as speaker and the older one as listener. Half of the listeners were given a plan for effective listening which emphasized the importance of asking questions if the speakers' messages were ambiguous. Replicating earlier findings, the plan manipulation was successful in encouraging listeners to ask questions when necessary. The major result was that listener questions not only had the expected trial-by-trial effect on message adequacy and communicative accuracy, but also showed a cumulative effect on speaker performance. When exposed to systematic listener feedback, speakers improved their initial messages over trials. Stimulus complexity was not a major determinant of performances. These findings suggest that provision of systematic listener feedback may be an effective method for teaching speaker skills to young children.     

Memory for conversation and the development of common ground

Efficient conversation is guided by the mutual knowledge, or common ground, that interlocutors form as a conversation progresses. Characterized from the perspective of commonly used measures of memory, efficient conversation should be closely associated with item memory—what was said—and context memory—who said what to whom. However, few studies have explicitly probed memory to evaluate what type of information is maintained following a communicative exchange. The current study examined how item and context memory relate to the development of common ground over the course of a conversation, and how these forms of memory vary as a function of one’s role in a conversation as speaker or listener. The process of developing common ground was positively related to both item and context memory. In addition, content that was spoken was remembered better than content that was heard. Our findings illustrate how memory assessments can complement language measures by revealing the impact that basic conversational processes have on memory for what has been discussed. By taking this approach, we show that not only does the process of forming common ground facilitate communication in the present, but it also promotes an enduring record of that event, facilitating conversation into the future.     

Resistance to the influences of others: Limits to the formation of a collective memory through conversational remembering

People often form collective memories by sharing their memories with others. Warnings about the reliability of one conversational participant can limit the extent to which conversations or other forms of postevent information can influence subsequent memory. Although this attenuation is consistently found for prewarnings, there are substantial reasons to suspect that, by carefully manipulating both individual characteristics of the listener in a conversation and the dynamics of the postevent conversation, one can restrict the effect even prewarnings have on the influence a speaker might have on the memory of a listener. Indeed, in situations in which a speaker contributes substantially to a conversation and the quality of memory of a listener is poor, prewarnings have the paradoxical effect of increasing the influence of the speaker on a listener's memory. Warnings may not always limit the formation of a collective memory. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Gestural sense-making: hand gestures as intersubjective linguistic enactments

The ubiquitous human practice of spontaneously gesturing while speaking demonstrates the embodiment, embeddedness, and sociality of cognition. The present essay takes gestural practice to be a paradigmatic example of a more general claim: human cognition is social insofar as our embedded, intelligent, and interacting bodies select and construct meaning in a way that is intersubjectively constrained and defeasible. Spontaneous co-speech gesture is markedly interesting because it at once confirms embodied aspects of linguistic meaning-making that formalist and linguistic turn-type philosophical approaches fail to appreciate, and it also forefronts intersubjectivity as an inherent and inherently normative dimension of communicative action. Co-speech hand gestures, as linguistically meaningful speech acts, demonstrate both sedimentation and spontaneity (in the sense of Maurice Merleau-Ponty??s dialectic of linguistic expression (2002)), or features of convention and nonconvention in a Gricean sense (1989). Yet neither pragmatic nor classic phenomenological approaches to communication can accommodate the practice of co-speech hand gesturing without some rehabilitation and reorientation. Pragmatic criteria of intersubjectivity, normativity, and rationality need to confront the non-propositional and nonverbal meaning-making of embodied encounters. Phenomenological treatments of expression and intersubjectivity must consider the normative nature of high-order social practices like language use. Reciprocally critical exchanges between these traditions and gesture studies yield an improved philosophy that treats language as a multi-modal medium for collaborative meaning achievement. The proper paradigm for these discussions is found in enactive approaches to social cognition. Co-speech hand gestures are first and foremost emergent elements of social interaction, not the external whirring of an isolated internal consciousness. In contrast to current literature that frequently presents gestures as uncontrollable bodily upsurge or infallible imagistic phenomenon that drives and dances with verbal or ??linguistic?? convention (McNeill 1992, 2005), I suggest that we study gestures as dynamic, embodied, and shared tools for collaborative sense-making.     

Interactionally situated cognition: a classroom example

According to situated cognition theory, cognitive accomplishments rely in part on structures and processes outside the individual. This article argues that interactional structures—particularly those created through language use—can make essential contributions to situated cognition in rational academic discourse. Most cognitive accomplishments rely in part on language, and language in use always has both representational and interactional functions. The article analyzes one classroom conversation, in order to illustrate how the interactional functions of speech can facilitate the cognitive accomplishments speakers make through that speech. By showing how closely cognition and interaction can interrelate, the article both supports theories of situated cognition and shows how cognition in at least some educational contexts cannot be extricated from enduring social structures and the construction of social identity.     

语言理解中的预设加工

预设是指以交际双方的共同背景(共享的知识或信念)为前提的、听话者根据特定语言标记(触发标记)及其限定的对象(计算内容)而推理出的非外显意义。例如,“张明又触发标记发表了论文计算内容”引发了“张明之前发表过论文”的预设推论。理解者依赖触发标记通达交际双方的共同背景,并在计算内容上生成完整的预设;随后,理解者连接生成的预设和共同背景,更新两者之间的关系。触发标记范畴、共同背景与预设的关联度、共同背景类型,以及理解者的参与动机会影响不同阶段的预设加工。未来研究可以从三个角度进一步探讨预设加工的认知基础：(1)采用计算建模的方法,量化交际互动中听话者理解预设的过程(如观点采择);(2)采用脑成像技术,揭示预设加工过程的神经基础;(3)以特殊人群为研究对象,检验和修正预设加工的认知模型。     

Training referential communication skills: The limits of success

We explored why an effective speaker-training technique failed to generalize to listener skills by comparing the relative effectiveness of speaker and listener training. Our hypotheses were that: either listening tasks utilize different skills than speaking tasks (thus one should not expect transfer), or the acquisition of listener skills precedes the acquisition of speaker skills (thus the transfer patterns tested in our previous research—speaker to listener—violated the normal developmental sequence), or there is no spontaneous transfer between tasks in different modalities (even though such tasks require the use of some of the same skills). This research utilized a referential communication paradigm. Five-year-olds received either speaker training, listener training, or both speaker and listener training. Children were tested for transfer on speaking and listening task after a 1-week delay. The results suggest that although speaking and listening tasks appear to require, at least in part, certain of the same skills, preschoolers do not exhibit spontaneous intermodality transfer. Theoretical implications for the relationship between speaker and listener skills are discussed.     

Theories of language acquisition

Prior to the advent of generative grammar, theoretical approaches to language development relied heavily upon the concepts ofdifferential reinforcement andimitation. Current studies of linguistic acquisition are largely dominated by the hypothesis that the child constructs his language on the basis of a primitive grammar which gradually evolves into a more complex grammar. This approach presupposes that the investigator does not impose his own grammatical rules on the utterances of the child; that the sound system of the child and the rules he employs to form sentences are to be described in their own terms, independently of the model provided by the adult linguistic community; and that there is a series of steps or stages through which the child passes on his way toward mastery of the adult grammar in his linguistic environment. This paper attempts to trace the development of human vocalization through prelinguistic stages to the development of what can be clearly recognized as language behavior, and then progresses to transitional phases in which the language of the child begins to approximate that of the adult model. In the view of the authors, the most challenging problems which confront theories of linguistic acquisition arise in seeking to account for structure of sound sequences, in the rules that enable the speaker to go from meaning to sound and which enable the listener to go from sound to meaning. The principal area of concern for the investigator, according to the authors, is the discovery of those rules at various stages of the learning process. The paper concludes with a return to the question of what constitutes an adequate theory of language ontogenesis. It is suggested that such a theory will have to be keyed to theories of cognitive development and will have to include and go beyond a theory which accounts for adult language competence and performance, since these represent only the terminal stage of linguistic ontogenesis.     

Conventions’ Revenge: Davidson,Derangement, and Dormativity

Davidson advocates a radical and powerful form of anti-conventionalism, on which the scope of a semantic theory is restricted to the most local of contexts: a particular utterance by a particular speaker. I argue that this hyper-localism undercuts the explanatory grounds for his assumption that semantic meaning is systematic, which is central, among other things, to his holism. More importantly, it threatens to undercut the distinction between word meaning and speaker’s meaning, which he takes to be essential to semantics. I argue that a moderate form of conventionalism can restore systematicity and the word/speaker distinction while accommodating Davidson’s insights about the complexities and contextual variability of language use.     

Examining Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis as One of the Main Views on the Relationship Between Language and Thought

One of those features that set human societies apart from animal societies is the use of language. Language is a vital part of every human culture and is a powerful social tool that we master at an early age. A second feature of humans is our ability to solve complex problems. For centuries philosophers have questioned whether these two abilities are related and, if so, what the nature of the relationship between language and thought is. At the beginning of the last century psychologists joined this debate and it is a topic that is currently generating a lot of research. Another factor in the study of language and thought is the role of culture. When we study a language from another country we see that it is not just the words and grammar that are different but the customs and traditions as well. Even the ideas of that culture and the way of dealing with life can be different. There are a number of views on the nature of the relationship between language and thought. But here we are going to explore one of those views, the linguistic relativity hypothesis (LRH), concerning that the language a speaker uses influences the way the speaker thinks.     

The Social N400 effect: how the presence of other listeners affects language comprehension

During conversation, it is necessary to keep track of what others can and cannot understand. Previous research has focused largely on understanding the time course along which knowledge about interlocutors influences language comprehension/production rather than the cognitive process by which interlocutors take each other’s perspective. In addition, most work has looked at the effects of knowledge about a speaker on a listener’s comprehension, and not on the possible effects of other listeners on a participant’s comprehension process. In the current study, we introduce a novel joint comprehension paradigm that addresses the cognitive processes underlying perspective taking during language comprehension. Specifically, we show that participants who understand a language stimulus, but are simultaneously aware that someone sitting next to them does not understand the same stimulus, show an electrophysiological marker of semantic integration difficulty (i.e., an N400-effect). Crucially, in a second group of participants, we demonstrate that presenting exactly the same sentences to the participant alone (i.e. without a co-listener) results in no N400-effect. Our results suggest that (1) information about co-listeners as well as the speaker affect language comprehension, and (2) the cognitive process by which we understand what others comprehend mirrors our own language comprehension processes.     

Communication and Cognition: The Social Beyond Language,Interaction and Culture

Cognition theories describe the social with terms like language, interaction or culture, whose theoretical status has also been discussed in modern sociology. These concepts are not well-positioned to understand the emergence and autonomy of social orders. Sociological theory of self-referential systems can be useful to reconstruct the bottom-up process which contributes to the emergence of the social as communication as well as to describe the way in which society exerts downward causation upon cognitive phenomena. The core of this theory is the systemic category of meaning as a shared horizon for psychic and social systems.