152 research outputs found

    Performance features in clinical skills assessment: Linguistic and cultural factors in the Membership of the Royal College of General Practitioners examination

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    This book is based on research looking at performance in clinical skills assessment from a linguistic and cultural perspective, with a view to understanding why there are such differential pass rates and giving suggestions on how this issue can be tackled. It is both a research report and a guide to the sociolinguistic methodology used. While the findings are based on a research project in partnership with the Royal College of General Practitioners, they are applicable to many other medical settings where standardised examinations of simulated consultations are used. More widely, this research addresses a central paradox in institutional life – how to balance validity in assessments and be fair to a diverse group of candidates in an increasingly diverse society, while maintaining reliability with standardised and universal marking criteria. It has been widely acknowledged that candidates from overseas fair less well in such examinations. A close look at the interactions which make up these simulated consultations shows that there are complex and subtle differences between passing and failing candidates which cannot be explained simply as ‘language’ and ‘cultural’ differences and put in a box separate from issues of fairness. These structured examinations, unintentionally, contribute to the weight of the assessment on overseas candidates, particularly in how interpersonal effectiveness is judged both explicitly and implicitly. The research has identified a range of successful candidate strategies which form the basis of a set of e–learning materials to be published by the RCGP. It also suggests that aspects of the exam, notably the more subjective features of interpersonal skills, are not best assessed in highly structured exams. This area needs to be better defined, using a new analytic language, to debate how and where it could be most effectively and fairly assessed

    Social cognition in South African children with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders

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    Research on the social-cognitive profile of individuals with prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) has confirmed poorer social skills in these children compared to healthy controls, independent of overall cognitive functioning. However, although children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) are known to have deficits in social-cognitive function, very little is known about the mechanisms underlying these impairments. I investigated social cognition in children with FASD by assessing Theory of Mind and emotion recognition ability as potential determinants of impaired social cognition, behaviourally and using neuroimaging. Study I showed that children aged 9-11 years (N =63) with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) and partial FAS performed more poorly on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, after controlling for IQ and executive function, suggesting difficulty in inferring people's mental states. Study II investigated the ability of 9-12 year old children (N = 88) to read people's facial emotions because this more basic level of social cue processing was considered a possible precursor to the impairments seen in Study I. An affective appraisal and working memory (WM) task (1- back and 2-back) was administered. Groups performed well on the 1-back, indicating ability to meet WM demands of the affective appraisal task. No behavioural group differences were shown on the affective appraisal task, which confirmed the suitability of this task to identify possible differences in neuronal activation, which I investigated in Study III. Analyses of these fMRI data on 64 children aged 9 -14 years showed that participants performed well on the relatively simple affective appraisal task. However, greater cortical activation was shown in exposed children when processing positive but less when processing negative facial expressions. These data demonstrate that heavy PAE alters activation within a cortical affective processing network. Because we know that children with FASD have alcohol-related social-cognitive impairments (Study I), differences in cortical activation may suggest that when children with FASD need to appraise affect in more challenging contexts, as in dynamic social interactions, they are likely to have greater difficulties. These data are consistent with two ideas: a) that alcohol-exposed children have difficulty appraising negative emotions and b) that difficulty contributes to the clinically described trouble these children have in "reading" facial social cues. If this is true, then an intervention program that improves the ability of these children to appraise negative emotions will likely (a) improve their ability to correctly interpret the context of their social interactions; (b) contribute to developing mental representations of an appropriate reaction to a given situation and (c) positively affect the various evaluation processes during social information processing, which in turn are imperative to social -cognitive functioning

    Head movement in conversation

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    This work explores the function and form of head movement and specifically head nods in free conversation. It opens with a comparison of three theories that are often considered as triggers for head nods: mimicry, backchannel responses, and responses to speakers' trouble. Early in this work it is assumed that head nods are well defined in terms of movement, and that they can be directly attributed, or at least better explained, by one theory compared to the others. To test that, comparisons between the theories are conducted following two different approaches. In one set of experiments a novel virtual reality method enables the analysis of perceived plausibility of head nods generated by models inspired by these theories. The results suggest that participants could not consciously assess differences between the predictions of the different theories. In part, this is due to a mixture of gamification and study design challenges. In addition, these experiments raise the question of whether or not it is reasonable to expect people to consciously process and report issues with the non-verbal behaviour of their conversational partners. In a second set of experiments the predictions of the theories are compared directly to head nods that are automatically detected from motion capture data. Matching the predictions with automatically detected head nods showed that not only are most predictions wrong, but also that most of the detected head nods are not accounted by any of the theories under question. Whereas these experiments do not adequately answer which theory best describe head nods in conversation, they suggest new avenues to explore: are head nods well defined in the sense that multiple people will agree that a specific motion is a head nod? and if so, what are their movement characteristics and what is their reliance on conversational context? Exploring these questions revealed a complex picture of what people consider to be head nods and their reliance on context. First, the agreement on what is a head nod is moderate, even when annotators are presented with video snippets that include only automatically detected nods. Second, head nods share movement characteristics with other behaviours, specifically laughter. Lastly, head nods are more accurately defined by their semantic characteristics than by their movement properties, suggesting that future detectors should incorporate more contextual features than movement alone. Overall, this thesis questions the coherence of our intuitive notion of a head nod and the adequacy of current approaches to describe the movements involved. It shows how some of the common theories that describe head movement and nods fail to explain most head movement in free conversation. In addition, it highlights subtleties in head movement and nods that are often overlooked. The findings from this work can inform the development of future head nods detection approaches, and provide a better understanding of non-verbal communication in general

    Gesture and Speech in Interaction - 4th edition (GESPIN 4)

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    International audienceThe fourth edition of Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GESPIN) was held in Nantes, France. With more than 40 papers, these proceedings show just what a flourishing field of enquiry gesture studies continues to be. The keynote speeches of the conference addressed three different aspects of multimodal interaction:gesture and grammar, gesture acquisition, and gesture and social interaction. In a talk entitled Qualitiesof event construal in speech and gesture: Aspect and tense, Alan Cienki presented an ongoing researchproject on narratives in French, German and Russian, a project that focuses especially on the verbal andgestural expression of grammatical tense and aspect in narratives in the three languages. Jean-MarcColletta's talk, entitled Gesture and Language Development: towards a unified theoretical framework,described the joint acquisition and development of speech and early conventional and representationalgestures. In Grammar, deixis, and multimodality between code-manifestation and code-integration or whyKendon's Continuum should be transformed into a gestural circle, Ellen Fricke proposed a revisitedgrammar of noun phrases that integrates gestures as part of the semiotic and typological codes of individuallanguages. From a pragmatic and cognitive perspective, Judith Holler explored the use ofgaze and hand gestures as means of organizing turns at talk as well as establishing common ground in apresentation entitled On the pragmatics of multi-modal face-to-face communication: Gesture, speech andgaze in the coordination of mental states and social interaction.Among the talks and posters presented at the conference, the vast majority of topics related, quitenaturally, to gesture and speech in interaction - understood both in terms of mapping of units in differentsemiotic modes and of the use of gesture and speech in social interaction. Several presentations explored the effects of impairments(such as diseases or the natural ageing process) on gesture and speech. The communicative relevance ofgesture and speech and audience-design in natural interactions, as well as in more controlled settings liketelevision debates and reports, was another topic addressed during the conference. Some participantsalso presented research on first and second language learning, while others discussed the relationshipbetween gesture and intonation. While most participants presented research on gesture and speech froman observer's perspective, be it in semiotics or pragmatics, some nevertheless focused on another importantaspect: the cognitive processes involved in language production and perception. Last but not least,participants also presented talks and posters on the computational analysis of gestures, whether involvingexternal devices (e.g. mocap, kinect) or concerning the use of specially-designed computer software forthe post-treatment of gestural data. Importantly, new links were made between semiotics and mocap data

    Exploring the Growth of Text-Reading Fluency in Upper-Elementary English Language Learners during Instruction based on Repeated Reading

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    For the large population of school-age English language learners in California and the United States, the challenge of learning a second language while learning academic content is formidable. Learning to read English skillfully is key to their success. Reading instruction focused on development of oral text-reading fluency has shown strong potential for accelerating the general reading achievement of native-English-speaking children, but there is a lack of concomitant research on English language learners. This dissertation describes a formative experiment with the goal to improve, in 9 weeks, the general reading achievement of 17 English language learners in Grades 3, 4, 5, and 6. These students were are at the Intermediate level of English development and lagged behind their native-English-speaking peers in reading. A formative experiment is basically descriptive in nature and utilizes both quantitative and qualitative study methods. The instructional intervention for this study was based on theories of language acquisition, reading development, and automatic processes of reading that underlie fluent reading. The intervention combined two types of repeated reading instruction: (a) silent repeated reading of controlled-vocabulary texts, with comprehension checks, and (b) repeated oral reading for performance, with explicit instruction about oral text-reading fluency. Instruction was altered as necessary, based on formative data, to meet the pedagogical goal. The students\u27 pre- and postintervention performances on reading-fluency indicators, including standardized measures, are compared and a detailed narrative of the experiment reported. The pedagogical goal, improved reading fluency with comprehension, was realized for most of the students on at least one instrument. On the standardized reading-fluency measures, increases in reading accuracy offset decreases in reading rate for many students, an unexpected finding, while comprehension of unfamiliar passages improved. Most students improved on at least two of four measures of prosodic reading, with the exception of third graders

    Exploring the Growth of Text-Reading Fluency in Upper-Elementary English Language Learners during Instruction based on Repeated Reading

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    For the large population of school-age English language learners in California and the United States, the challenge of learning a second language while learning academic content is formidable. Learning to read English skillfully is key to their success. Reading instruction focused on development of oral text-reading fluency has shown strong potential for accelerating the general reading achievement of native-English-speaking children, but there is a lack of concomitant research on English language learners. This dissertation describes a formative experiment with the goal to improve, in 9 weeks, the general reading achievement of 17 English language learners in Grades 3, 4, 5, and 6. These students were are at the Intermediate level of English development and lagged behind their native-English-speaking peers in reading. A formative experiment is basically descriptive in nature and utilizes both quantitative and qualitative study methods. The instructional intervention for this study was based on theories of language acquisition, reading development, and automatic processes of reading that underlie fluent reading. The intervention combined two types of repeated reading instruction: (a) silent repeated reading of controlled-vocabulary texts, with comprehension checks, and (b) repeated oral reading for performance, with explicit instruction about oral text-reading fluency. Instruction was altered as necessary, based on formative data, to meet the pedagogical goal. The students\u27 pre- and postintervention performances on reading-fluency indicators, including standardized measures, are compared and a detailed narrative of the experiment reported. The pedagogical goal, improved reading fluency with comprehension, was realized for most of the students on at least one instrument. On the standardized reading-fluency measures, increases in reading accuracy offset decreases in reading rate for many students, an unexpected finding, while comprehension of unfamiliar passages improved. Most students improved on at least two of four measures of prosodic reading, with the exception of third graders

    Approche psychophysique de la perception auditive para et extra linguistique chez le sujet sourd post lingual implanté cochléaire

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    Les bénéfices liés à l'implantation cochléaire sont connus pour la discrimination de la parole dans le silence. En revanche, leurs capacités perceptives pour les informations para linguistiques et extra linguistiques sont moins décrites. Nos travaux expérimentaux ont consisté à caractériser les éventuels déficits observés et expliquer leurs mécanismes pour la catégorisation auditive, pour la perception de la prosodie et de la musique. Nous avons dans ce but réalisé plusieurs études psychophysiques dans lesquelles leurs performances étaient comparées à celles de sujets contrôle normo entendant. Nos résultats font état d'un important déficit de perception auditive para et extra linguistique chez les sujets implantés cochléaires, vraisemblablement lié à deux principales raisons. La première réside dans la dégradation spectrale du signal acoustique par le processeur vocal de l'implant et l'insuffisance de restitution de l'information relative à la fréquence fondamentale. C'est pourquoi le déficit apparaît réduit voire absent chez les sujets bénéficiant d'une audition résiduelle associée à l'implant. La deuxième raison tient à la réorganisation corticale suivant la période de surdité, qui facilite le traitement de la parole mais pourrait se révéler délétère pour la perception des autres informations auditives.Cochlear implants have been shown to restore excellent speech recognition in quiet. However, post lingually deafened adults experience persistent handicap following cochlear implantation, which might be related to their perception abilities in other auditory fields than speech. In this report, we conducted several psychophysical experiments, which aimed at assessing the characteristics of their auditory categorization and their abilities for prosody and music perception. Normal hearing subjects were also tested in a control group. We found a strong and durable deficit, underpinned by two plausible mechanisms. First, the acoustic signal processing through the implant leads to an important spectral impoverishment and limits access to fundamental frequency information. Hence some cochlear implant recipients with substantial low-frequency residual hearing may achieve near normal performance. Brain plasticity following auditory deprivation facilitates the compensatory strategies for speech recognition but might also influence negatively the outcomes in para linguistic and extra linguistic information

    Tagungsband der 12. Tagung Phonetik und Phonologie im deutschsprachigen Raum

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