Do you see what I mean?

Visualizers, like logicians, have long been concerned with meaning. Generalizing from MacEachren's overview of cartography, visualizers have to think about how people extract meaning from pictures (psychophysics), what people understand from a picture (cognition), how pictures are imbued with meaning (semiotics), and how in some cases that meaning arises within a social and/or cultural context. If we think of the communication acts carried out in the visualization process further levels of meaning are suggested. Visualization begins when someone has data that they wish to explore and interpret; the data are encoded as input to a visualization system, which may in its turn interact with other systems to produce a representation. This is communicated back to the user(s), who have to assess this against their goals and knowledge, possibly leading to further cycles of activity. Each phase of this process involves communication between two parties. For this to succeed, those parties must share a common language with an agreed meaning. We offer the following three steps, in increasing order of formality: terminology (jargon), taxonomy (vocabulary), and ontology. Our argument in this article is that it's time to begin synthesizing the fragments and views into a level 3 model, an ontology of visualization. We also address why this should happen, what is already in place, how such an ontology might be constructed, and why now

Metaphorical Meanings. Do you see what I mean?

My intention in this paper is to propose a conception of metaphorical meaning on which the meaning of a metaphor includes propositional as well as non-propositional features. I will make two general claims on behalf of the proposed account: first, it is intuitive; second, it is of theoretical value. In claiming that the proposed account is of theoretical value, I mean only that its adoption leads to an increased understanding of the nature of metaphor: of metaphorical thought and ofmetaphorical communication in particular

Do You See What I Mean? Visual Resolution of Linguistic Ambiguities

Understanding language goes hand in hand with the ability to integrate complex contextual information obtained via perception. In this work, we present a novel task for grounded language understanding: disambiguating a sentence given a visual scene which depicts one of the possible interpretations of that sentence. To this end, we introduce a new multimodal corpus containing ambiguous sentences, representing a wide range of syntactic, semantic and discourse ambiguities, coupled with videos that visualize the different interpretations for each sentence. We address this task by extending a vision model which determines if a sentence is depicted by a video. We demonstrate how such a model can be adjusted to recognize different interpretations of the same underlying sentence, allowing to disambiguate sentences in a unified fashion across the different ambiguity types.Comment: EMNLP 201

Do You See What I Mean? Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis.

This chapter explores a sociolinguistic approach to computer-mediated communication (CMC), by examining how higher education teachers use digital media to manage interpersonal interaction in their online courses, form impressions, shape and maintain relationships with their students. Previous studies have often focused on the differences between online and offline interactions, though contemporary research is moving towards the view that CMC should be studied as an embedded linguistic form in everyday life. The study of language in these contexts is typically based on text-based forms of CMC, (often referred to as computer-mediated discourse analysis). Within this, focus in the chapter is on the devising and implementation of pragmatic linguistics of online interactions; at a high level this refers to meaning-making, shared belief systems and intercultural differences; at a specific level this includes issues such as turn-taking and the sequential analysis and organisation of virtual ‘interlocution’

Do You See What I Mean? Corticospinal Excitability During Observation of Culture-Specific Gestures

People all over the world use their hands to communicate expressively. Autonomous gestures, also known as emblems, are highly social in nature, and convey conventionalized meaning without accompanying speech. To study the neural bases of cross-cultural social communication, we used single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to measure corticospinal excitability (CSE) during observation of culture-specific emblems. Foreign Nicaraguan and familiar American emblems as well as meaningless control gestures were performed by both a Euro-American and a Nicaraguan actor. Euro-American participants demonstrated higher CSE during observation of the American compared to the Nicaraguan actor. This motor resonance phenomenon may reflect ethnic and cultural ingroup familiarity effects. However, participants also demonstrated a nearly significant (p = 0.053) actor by emblem interaction whereby both Nicaraguan and American emblems performed by the American actor elicited similar CSE, whereas Nicaraguan emblems performed by the Nicaraguan actor yielded higher CSE than American emblems. The latter result cannot be interpreted simply as an effect of ethnic ingroup familiarity. Thus, a likely explanation of these findings is that motor resonance is modulated by interacting biological and cultural factors

Do you see what I mean? The role of visual speech information in lexical representations

Human speech is necessarily multimodal and audiovisual redundancies in speech may play a vital role in speech perception across the lifespan. The majority of previous studies have focused particularly on how language is learned from auditory input, but the way in which audiovisual speech information is perceived and comprehended remains less well understood. Here, I examine how audiovisual and visual-only speech information is represented for known words, and if intersensory processing efficiency ability predicts the strength of the lexical representation. To explore the relationship between intersensory processing ability (indexed by matching temporally synchronous auditory and visual stimulation) and the strength of lexical representations, adult subjects participated in an audiovisual word recognition task and the Intersensory Processing Efficiency Protocol (IPEP). Participants were able to reliably identify a correct referent object across manipulations of modality (audiovisual vs visual-only) and pronunciation (correctly vs mispronounced). Correlational analyses did not reveal any relationship between processing efficiency and visual speech information in lexical representations. However, the results presented here suggest that adults’ lexical representations robustly include visual speech information and that visual speech information is sublexically processed during speech perception

Empathy revisited: the effect of representational system matching on certain counseling process and outcome variables

Therapist-offered empathy has been shown to be an important ingredient in the counseling relationship. Many operational definitions of empathy and tools for measurement of this elusive quality exist. Most empathy measures have been criticized on methodological grounds and their construct validity is suspect. Yet there is little argument with the trend which emerges from the data; the overall relationship between empathy, or those dimensions tapped by empathy measures and effective therapy appears positive. The nature of empathy however remains enigmatic and it is evident that all of the variables which account for the empathic process have not been explicated.;This study defined and investigated the validity and effect on counseling of a new dimension of empathy. From their linguistic analysis of effective therapy Bandler and Grinder have formulated the construct of representational systems or internal maps used by individuals to organize reality. Such maps are visual, auditory or kinesthetic and are reflected in natural language. Do you see what I mean? Empathy, then, is operationally defined as the counselor\u27s matching language with the representational system used by the client.;It was hypothesized that counselors who use representational system matching would: (1) be perceived by subjects as more empathic than counselors who do not (accepted, p = .0045); (2) be perceived by judges as more empathic than counselors who do not (accepted, p = .0165); (3) elicit a greater willingness to self-disclose than counselors who do not (rejected) and (4) be preferred by clients over counselors who do not use representational matching (accepted p \u3c .05).;Subjects (N = 20) were undergraduates at The College of William and Mary who met with each of two counselors, in counterbalanced order, for an analogue of a beginning counseling interview. One counselor used representational system matching; the other counselor took a more generic, human relations, approach to empathy. After each interview subjects completed Barrett-Lennard\u27s Relationship Inventory (RI) and Jourard\u27s Willingness-to-Disclose Questionnaire (WDQ). Following their second interview subjects indicated their preferred counselor. Covariates were: (1) Carkhuff\u27s Empathic Understanding Scale (EU) which also served as a dependent measure; (2) The Counseling Readiness Scale (Crs) of Gough and Heilbrun\u27s Adjective Check List and (3) Rotter\u27s I-E scale. The Latin-square design produced data analyzed by: repeated measures analysis of covariance (Hypotheses 1-3); stepwise regression (Hypotheses 1 & 2) and Chi square (Hypothesis 4).;Results indicate that both subjects and judges perceived the representational system matching counselor as more empathic than the generic empathy counselor. While EU accounted for 11.76% of the variance on RI-empathy scale scores, representational system matching accounted for 11.94% of the variance beyond that accounted for by EU. Clients preferred the representational system matching counselor by a ratio of 3 to 1.;It was concluded that representational system matching is an important dimension of empathy and the recommendation was made that beginning courses in counseling techniques and human relations training include a section on identifying and responding to client\u27s representational systems. Recommendations were made for further study

Commonplaces in risk talk: Face threats and forms of interaction.

Talk about risk is problematic for interaction; it can involve the speaker or hearer saying things that threaten participants' 'face', the ways they want themselves to be seen by others. One way of dealing with these threats to face, and to keep the conversation going, is the use of commonplaces. Commonplaces, generally applicable and generally known arguments, play an important role in interaction, invoking shared, taken-for-granted perspectives embedded in familiar roles and everyday practices. They are similar to some of the frames discussed in risk communication, but they focus our attention on rhetoric and interaction rather than cognition. In this paper, I show how commonplaces are used in focus group discussions of public choices involving dangers to life or health. They tend to be used in response to dilemmas, when a speaker is put on the spot, and they tend to lead to other commonplaces. Analysis of commonplaces supports those who argue that studies of public perception of risks and programmes of communication about risks need to be sensitive to the personal interactions, rhetorical strategies, and cultural embeddedness of any risk talk