Rhythm matters: the role of rhythmic attending for non-native learners of English

In English connected speech, reduction processes can dramatically affect the phonetic shape of words, especially function words, reducing their intelligibility for non-native listeners. There is a close connection between reduction and speech rhythm: metrically weak syllables reduce more, and may be cued only by subtle phonetic detail that non- native listeners struggle to detect. Despite growing evidence that attention to speech and music is rhythmically guided and that speech processing depends on language rhythm, little work has tested whether encouraging non-native learners to attend to rhythm might support their comprehension of casual speech. This thesis investigates whether comprehension of Glaswegian connected speech can be improved if English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners receive training which relies on entraining the learners’ attention to a rhythmic speech stimulus. Three experiments were conducted. All three of them followed the same pre-test, training and post-test structure. The training differed across experiments as explained below, but in all cases, the pre-test and post-test assessed participants’ comprehension of reduced unstressed function words and morphemes in casually-spoken sentences. All pre-tests and post-tests involved listening to fast casual sentences spoken by Glaswegian English native speakers while reading the sentences on a computer screen where they appeared with gaps, corresponding to reduced unstressed function words. Participants’ task was to fill these gaps with the words they heard. The participants’ score on these tests was the dependent variable. Experiment 1 investigated whether listening to rhythmically organized speech would improve learners’ comprehension as opposed to speech that was not rhythmically organized. In its training phase, EFL learners in the experimental group listened to speech of high rhythmicity, i.e. sentences of regular metrical structure which had been recorded by asking the speaker to align their speech to a regular metronome beat. Each sentence was presented four times, with its rate increasing from slow to fast, so that participants were exposed to a range of degrees of phonetic reduction, within a rhythmically predictable frame. A control group of learners listened to speech of low rhythmicity: metrically irregular sentences which had been recorded without a metronome beat, as part of a read story; again they heard four presentations ranging from slow to fast rate. To maintain attention, participants’ task during training was to count the number of times food was mentioned. Experiment 1 did not show a significant difference between the experimental and control group in terms of improvement in pre- and post-test comprehension scores, though the numerical result showed more improvement in the experimental than in the control group, i.e. in the expected direction. Experiment 2 tested whether sensorimotor synchronisation with the beat in speech would improve the learners’ connected speech comprehension, as opposed to control training. Participants in the experimental group received training in which they performed sensorimotor synchronisation (i.e. finger tapping) with the beat they perceived in the speech they heard, while the control group received training in which they listened to the same stimuli but did not tap to the beat. Instead their task was to listen and tap their finger when they heard a randomly placed click sound. Three listener groups took part in this experiment: Chinese EFL learners, native English speakers of a different variety than the speech presented (Canadian and US English), and Glaswegian English native speakers. The results showed that only the Chinese EFL learners improved in the post-test, compared to the control group. In the Canadian/US group, an interesting interaction was found suggesting that the listener’s musical ability affected whether they could benefit from the training. No improvement was found in the Glaswegian native group, whose performance was highest overall. In the third experiment, Chinese EFL learners, who were attending a preparatory course to study at the University of Glasgow, took part in a short 4-week course, with one 40-minute session per week. In this training phase they learned, as a group, to drum the rhythm of Glaswegian English utterances. The control group continued their curriculum as usual. Neither group showed a significant improvement in comprehension from pre- to post-test, which may relate to aspects of the group training setting, or to the level of English of the participants. The results allowed further exploration of the role of prior musical ability, but this did not appear to affect performance, unlike in Experiment 2. Taken together, these results are interpreted in the light of Dynamic Attending Theory (Large & Jones 1999) as well as of previous research on perceptual learning and the role of musical ability in learning a second language. Overall, the results of the three experiments offer only limited support for the idea that rhythmic training helps comprehension. The mix of negative and positive findings is interpreted in the light of Dynamic Attending Theory (L&J 1999), as well as previous research on perceptual learning and the role of musical ability in learning a second language. The conclusion argued for here is that benefits of rhythmic training are seen under specific circumstances, where training is set up in such a way as to optimize the possibility of entrainment to speech

3D-in-2D Displays for ATC.

This paper reports on the efforts and accomplishments of the 3D-in-2D Displays for ATC project at the end of Year 1. We describe the invention of 10 novel 3D/2D visualisations that were mostly implemented in the Augmented Reality ARToolkit. These prototype implementations of visualisation and interaction elements can be viewed on the accompanying video. We have identified six candidate design concepts which we will further research and develop. These designs correspond with the early feasibility studies stage of maturity as defined by the NASA Technology Readiness Level framework. We developed the Combination Display Framework from a review of the literature, and used it for analysing display designs in terms of display technique used and how they are combined. The insights we gained from this framework then guided our inventions and the human-centered innovation process we use to iteratively invent. Our designs are based on an understanding of user work practices. We also developed a simple ATC simulator that we used for rapid experimentation and evaluation of design ideas. We expect that if this project continues, the effort in Year 2 and 3 will be focus on maturing the concepts and employment in a operational laboratory settings

Terrestrial Things: War, Language, and Value in Afghanistan

This dissertation is an ethnographic engagement with the social and political space of Afghanistan and how it has been shaped by the intensities of warfare in the last decade, with a focus on the realms of language, representation and economy. Taking Kabul as the panoramic ground of profound social and epistemological transformations, the dissertation traces a crucial shift beginning in 2011-2012, from a highly speculative war economy (a “green zone economy” that privileged the commodification of language and culture and the privatization of war, with crisis as an alibi for governmentality) to one based on equally speculative practices of prospecting for natural resources in the Afghan underground: where an estimated three trillion dollars’ worth of copper, gold, iron-ore, marble and oil & gas is presumed to lie in wait. I illustrate the nuanced epistemological concerns and political contestations that stem from an Afghan effort to distinguish between sources of violence and sources of economic value (especially in the aftermath of Kabul’s demilitarization) in a milieu where foreign militaries presuppose that civilians and insurgents cannot be distinguished, except through the medium of war-time translation and collaboration. The twin concern with generalized forms of death dealing and tragedy, on one hand, and the moral and political exigency for Afghans to distinguish between a world of appearances and one of essences (the Islamic and Quranic interpretation of zahir (exterior/surface) and batin (interior/ground), on the other, opens onto a set of epistemological concerns undergirded by several oppositions, which I argue, are central to American war making. I illustrate that the movement between these artificial binaries (Persian/Pashto and English, literacy and illiteracy, rationality and irrationality, repetition and transformation) inspires aspirational fantasy on an economic frontier and invests some Afghans (especially those who speak English and are literate) with the power of calculative reason (aql) and understanding (fahm and dânish), while condemning those who are illiterate (and sometimes those who only speak Persian and/or Pashto) to forms physical supplementarity and crisis--from literally being expendable prosthetic bodies (human body armor) to the breakdown of meaning in incestuous relations and the intensification of moral crisis. In this context, conventional writing and the felt lack of its absence illustrate for us the logic of war in more consequential ways. The belief that writing is the domain of what can be known (rationally understood) and universally applied invigorates the ideology of literate persons and war-time collaborators with shocking breadth and tenacity. It organizes antagonisms between persons and structures forms of death-dealing. I trace how the production of a binary around literacy and illiteracy produces, even in moments of technological acquisition, the retrospective fantasy that orality is not only the prior but also the locus of unfettered subversion and ignorance of the law. This misrecognition of linguistic diversity as lack comes to inform, in contexts of unprecedented transnational war-time activity, the charge that Afghans are beholden to an excessive localism that fuels the predicaments of the Afghan State and errors of judgement (such as incestuous transgressions, and suicide bombing) which would destroy society altogether. The issue of vulnerability to ideological suasion and excess emerges alongside these presuppositions. It informs the belief that the incapacity to exercise reason (due to illiteracy) renders Afghans vulnerable to diverse forms of propaganda and the inability to distinguish between the world of appearances (both technological media images and the Islamic notion of the zahir (surface manifestation)) and reality. I trace these complexities through a series of intense contact points where these oppositions come into play and determine forms of access and violence 1) in translational contexts during combat missions where linguistic transformation results in deadly misunderstanding 2) in familial contexts and contestations over property, where the failure of interpersonal and extrajudicial mediation results in mass murder 3) in courtrooms where failed suicide bombers (who did not detonate out of technological error or because they were attacked by members of the Afghan National Police) are subject to the limitations of oral testimony and to the belief that photographic evidence proves that they will repeat their crimes if released from prison 4) instances of incest that arise out of illiteracy and, when exposed, generate moral crisis 5) the production of zones of exteriority and interiority (especially in Kabul’s Green Zone) that rely on phamakological inclusion and reproduce the literal supplementarity of Afghan bodies 6) the attempt to find the “real” sources of economic value as part of a multi-national gold and mineral extraction endeavor—the continuation of an obsession with the Afghan ground that has a long imperial history from the 1800’s onwards (when it was assessed through botanical, railway and coal prospecting missions). Together, these sites and the consideration of the earthen terrain alongside the terrain of rationality and linguistic difference situate us in the midst of wartime catastrophe. They foreground the fantasy that rationalism is the sine qua non of modernism, and the belief that literacy is the basis for reflective and intellectual thought, and for being human. But what they also disclose for us is that in its absence you can (and sometimes must) die

Minstrels in the drawing room: music and novel-reading in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Walter Scott, and George Eliot

"Minstrels in the Drawing Room" is an investigation of the representation of musical listening in the nineteenth-century novel. Theoretical accounts of the novel have tended to see it as a universal form, one that opportunistically subsumes all others as its represented content; descriptions of the novel's implied audience often interpret novel-reading as an essentially absorptive activity linking private reading to public belonging through an act of identification. For the writers I discuss here, however, musical listening is interesting because it is a rival mode of shared aesthetic experience that, before the advent of sound recording, was necessarily social. This dissertation draws on recent developments in the history of reading and media theory to describe how novels by three central figures of the European novelistic canon - Goethe, Scott, and Eliot - turn to musical listening to reflect upon the ways in which the absolutely open nature of the novel's mode of address is nevertheless prone to limitation. The dissertation thus complicates often all-or-nothing theories of novel-reading, offering instead a description of how novels model a distanced identification between reader and text

Obiter Dicta

"Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication. Organized after Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, this unschooled exercise in aesthetic thought—gleefully dilettantish, oftentimes dangerously close to the epigrammatic—interrogates an array of subject matter (although inescapably circling back to the curiously resemblant histories of Western visual art and instrumental music) through the lens of drive-by speculation. Erick Verran’s approach to philosophical inquiry follows the brute-force literary technique of Jacques Derrida to exhaustively favor the material grammar of a signifier over hand-me-down meaning, juxtaposing outer semblances with their buried systems and our etched-in-stone intuitions about color and illusion, shape and value, with lessons stolen from seemingly unrelatable disciplines. Interlarded with extracts of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy as well as Roland Barthes, this cache of incidental remarks eschews what’s granular for the biggest picture available, leaving below the hyper-specialized fields of academia for a bird’s-eye view of their crop circles. Obiter Dicta is an unapologetic experiment in intellectual dot-connecting that challenges much long-standing wisdom about everything from illuminated manuscripts to Minecraft and the evolution of European music with lyrical brevity; that is, before jumping to the next topic.

VR Storytelling

The question of cinematic VR production has been on the table for several years. This is due to the peculiarity of VR language which, even if it is de ned by an image that surrounds and immerses the viewer rather than placing them, as in the classic cinematic situation, in front of a screen, relies decisively on an audiovisual basis that cannot help but refer to cinematic practices of constructing visual and auditory experience. Despite this, it would be extremely reductive to consider VR as the mere transposition of elements of cinematic language. The VR medium is endowed with its own speci city, which inevitably impacts its forms of narration. We thus need to investigate the narrative forms it uses that are probably related to cinematic language, and draw their strength from the same basis, drink from the same well, but develop according to di erent trajectories, thus displaying di erent links and a nities

The right words in the proper places: an investigation of the poetry of Tony Harrison, from text to TV.

This thesis looks at the work of Tony Harrison: his poetry, "from The School of Eloquence", and "The Mother of the Muses", his theatre works, Yan Tan Tethera and Medea: A Sex-War Opera, and his televisual documentary-poems, "v.", The Blasphemers' Banquet, Loving Memory and Black Daisies for the Bride. I examine these works in the light of their incorporation and manipulation of 'external' voices and cultures: of his working-class Leeds background, discourse feminine, Muslim fundamentalists, literary 'blasphemers'. In later works, this technique is framed in terms of supplementing absences, first of voice, then of the human self-presence that voice figures: of the dead and the mentally non-present. I look specifically at how this representation of elements generally seen as impropre to the media he occupies on their part, as a public poet, enables the inserted material he appropriates from its pro pre milieu a platform from which to comment on its conventional, marginalised status. Conversely, I investigate how the gesture of representation takes Harrison's work further from the 'original' he is seeking to incorporate as in supplying their 'lack' he occupies their propre space, increasingly in effect removing them from the discourse. This double process, presented in terms of Derrida's ideas on supplementation and joining-as-separating, is seen to be effected by Harrison's manipulation of codes - oral/typographic, restricted/elaborated. His claimed philosophical positions, with regard to phallogocentric discourse versus 'discours feminine' and theocentric theatre versus theatre of cruelty, are interrogated. This brings in Lacanian-psychoanalytic notions of subjectivity, Harrison's and those of the real people he invaginates into his texts. His giving freedom to these unbounded forms and their propre occupants is seen as ultimately a reframing of governance, a re-drawing of boundaries, which in turn are overrun by the properly ungovernable properties of film/video, human subjects, and language itself

After Modern Jazz: The Avant-Garde and Jazz Historiography.

After Modern Jazz rethinks the history of the jazz avant-garde in dialogue with aesthetic philosophy, critical theory, and African American history. It focuses on the conjuncture of the late 1960s and 1970s as a point from which to revise canonical narratives of jazz history, and connects music and aesthetics to the political economies of cultural production and the transnational politics of decolonization. Part I of the dissertation develops an ideology critique of jazz historiography, posing an explanation for the absence of 1970s experimentalism from jazz history in the unsymbolizable historical break of “1968”, and reframing the emergence and development of “jazz discourse” in the 20th century as a hegemonic struggle in which “jazz” knitted together contradictory ideological and racial projects. A reinterpretation of Theodor Adorno’s notorious attack on jazz suggests its continuing relevance for theorizing the conjunction of critical theory and improvisation. Part II of the dissertation analyzes several key musical and counter-ideological projects of the avant-garde from 1965-1977. The jazz panels of the mid-1960s were a public stage for the performance of a masculinist black-white political dialectic, and musician Archie Shepp’s politics of culture emerged within and against the silences and foreclosures of the historiography of slavery in the U.S. The jazz avant-garde displaced the American popular song as the raw material of jazz improvisation with a new constitutive outside: a variety of compositional languages and an undifferentiated field of “world music.” Amid the contradictory cultural politics of African decolonization and revolutionary movements, the performance of African American musicians at the 1969 Pan-African Festival of Arts and Culture in Algiers offers a perspective on transnational and diasporic cultural formation. Finally, the dissertation interprets the mid-1970s popularity of duo improvisation as an accommodation to the conditions imposed on artistic practice by an emerging regime of neoliberalism. While the improvisatory music made in the 1970s explore the sensory terrain of a politics that can oppose and resist neoliberalism, those resources for resistance are densely encoded within the music’s aesthetic project: the duo, along with other avant-garde musical aesthetics, constitute in Adorno’s terms a “self-unconscious historiography of their epoch.”Ph.D.HistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89753/1/macleanr_1.pd

A complex systems approach to education in Switzerland

The insights gained from the study of complex systems in biological, social, and engineered systems enables us not only to observe and understand, but also to actively design systems which will be capable of successfully coping with complex and dynamically changing situations. The methods and mindset required for this approach have been applied to educational systems with their diverse levels of scale and complexity. Based on the general case made by Yaneer Bar-Yam, this paper applies the complex systems approach to the educational system in Switzerland. It confirms that the complex systems approach is valid. Indeed, many recommendations made for the general case have already been implemented in the Swiss education system. To address existing problems and difficulties, further steps are recommended. This paper contributes to the further establishment complex systems approach by shedding light on an area which concerns us all, which is a frequent topic of discussion and dispute among politicians and the public, where billions of dollars have been spent without achieving the desired results, and where it is difficult to directly derive consequences from actions taken. The analysis of the education system's different levels, their complexity and scale will clarify how such a dynamic system should be approached, and how it can be guided towards the desired performance