Getting to the Core of Role: Defining Interpreters' Role Space

This article describes a new model of interpreted interactions that will help students as well as experienced practitioners define and delineate the decisions that they make. By understanding the dimensions that comprise the concept we call role, interpreters can more effectively allow participants to have successful communicative interactions

Synchrony and copying in conversational interactions

Proceedings of the 3rd Nordic Symposium on Multimodal Communication. Editors: Patrizia Paggio, Elisabeth Ahlsén, Jens Allwood, Kristiina Jokinen, Costanza Navarretta. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 15 (2011), 18–24. © 2011 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/22532

The development of conversational and communication skills

This thesis investigates the development of children's conversational and communication skills. This is done by investigating both communicative process and outcome in two communication media: face-to-face interaction and audio-only interaction. Communicative outcome is objectively measured by assessing accuracy of performance of communication tasks. A multi-level approach to the assessment of communicative process is taken. Non-verbal aspects of process which are investigated are gaze and gesture. Verbal aspects of process range from global linguistic assessments such as length of conversational turn, to a detailed coding of utterance function according to Conversational Games analysis. The results show that children of 6 years and less do not adapt to the loss of visual signals in audio-only communication, and their performance suffers. Both the structure of children's dialogues and their use of visual signals were found to differ from that of adults. It is concluded that both verbal and non-verbal communication strategies develop into adulthood. Successful integration of these different aspects of communication is central to being an effective communicator

Acomodación fonética durante las interacciones conversacionales: una visión general

During conversational interactions such as tutoring, instruction-giving tasks, verbal negotiations, or just talking with friends, interlocutors’ behaviors experience a series of changes due to the characteristics of their counterpart and to the interaction itself. These changes are pervasively present in every social interaction, and most of them occur in the sounds and rhythms of our speech, which is known as acoustic-prosodic accommodation, or simply phonetic accommodation. The consequences, linguistic and social constraints, and underlying cognitive mechanisms of phonetic accommodation have been studied for at least 50 years, due to the importance of the phenomenon to several disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, and sociology. Based on the analysis and synthesis of the existing empirical research literature, in this paper we present a structured and comprehensive review of the qualities, functions, onto- and phylogenetic development, and modalities of phonetic accommodation.Durante las interacciones conversacionales como dar una tutoría, dar instrucciones, las negociaciones verbales, o simplemente hablar con amigos, los comportamientos de las personas experimentan una serie de cambios debido a las características de su interlocutor y a la interacción en sí. Estos cambios están presentes en cada interacción social, y la mayoría de ellos ocurre en los sonidos y ritmos del habla, lo cual se conoce como acomodación acústico-prosódica, o simplemente acomodación fonética. Las consecuencias, las limitaciones lingüísticas y sociales, y los mecanismos cognitivos subyacentes a la acomodación fonética se han estudiado durante al menos 50 años, debido a la importancia del fenómeno para varias disciplinas como la lingüística, la psicología, y la sociología. A partir del análisis y síntesis de la literatura de investigación empírica existente, en este artículo presentamos una revisión estructurada y exhaustiva de las cualidades, funciones, desarrollo onto- y filogenético, y modalidades de la acomodación fonética

When I Move, You Move: Coordination in Conversation

Researchers have been interested in the dynamics of human conversation for several decades. One major focus of this line of research has been the mechanisms by which humans coordinate in conversation. To study the coordination of conversation within dyads often requires an understanding of statistical methods, which handle time series data. Traditionally, there are no definitive standards for defining one of the important parameters in time series analysis, window size. Therefore, the purpose of the current project was to elucidate the mechanisms through which conversational coordination emerges by utilizing conversational turn-taking as the basis for choosing the appropriate window size in the time series analysis. Data from previously collected videotaped conversational interactions were analyzed for the presence of movement coordination using an image-differencing algorithm in MATLAB. Additionally, speech signals time-locked to the video segments were examined for vocal synchrony in pitch using Praat. The participants from the original study were asked to engage in three tasks designed to elicit sarcasm. Only data from one of these tasks, discussing an ironic scenario, were analyzed for the current project. There were eleven dyads each contributing one conversation and each lasting between 2 and 8 minutes. It was thought that both movement and pitch were possible coordination mechanisms, but that coordination patterns would only be uncovered by using time series windows adjusted for turn-taking rates in each dyad. Results from windowed cross-correlations revealed that participants significantly coordinated movement. Post-hoc tests revealed an effect of window size on mean correlations. Although not significant, results from the analysis of vocal coordination revealed a pattern of results similar to those from the movement coordination study. This could be due to a lack of statistical power. Interestingly, patterns of movement coordination were found strictly as a function of a vocal parameter: turn-taking. These results suggest a novel approach to the study of conversational coordination and a more crucial role for turn-taking in the emergence of coordinative structures

Quantitative analysis of backchannels uttered by an interviewer during neuropsychological tests

International audienceThis paper examines in detail the backchannels uttered by a French professional interviewer during a neuropsychological test of verbal memories. These backchannels are short utterances such as oui, d'accord, uhm, etc. They are mainly produced here to encourage subjects to retrieve a set of words after their controlled encoding. We show that the choice of lexical items, their production rates and their associated prosodic contours are influenced by the subject performance and conditioned by the protocol

The influence of conversational setting and cognitive load on reference in 2-party spoken dialogue

The main objective of this thesis is to investigate the way in which the conversational setting (video-mediated compared with face-to-face) and cognitive load (as illustrated by time pressure) influence spoken dialogue, with particular emphasis on the way speakers refer to objects in a discourse. Two studies were carried out which examined dialogues of pairs of participants performing a problem-solving task. Study 1 examined word duration in a video-mediated conversational setting. In Study 2, pairs of participants performed the Map Task (Brown et al., 1984) under time pressure and without the pressure of time. One group of participants performed the task in a face-to-face conversational setting and the other in a video-mediated setting. Consistent with the Dual Process Model (Bard et al., 2000), cognitive load influenced complex processes, such as task strategy and the establishment of common ground, or mutual knowledge. In contrast, automatic processes, such as articulatory priming (the faster articulation of repeated mentions of words referring to the same object), occurred irrespective of the setting in which the conversation took place or of any increase in cognitive load. Under time pressure, interlocutors were less collaborative and less co-ordinated in the way they established common ground than without the pressure of time. Time pressure also led interlocutors to adopt a strategy of making fewer references to objects, or landmarks on the map. While articulatory reduction occurred irrespective of the conversational setting, participants in a video-mediated setting spoke more slowly than participants in a face-to-face setting. Following Lindblom (1995), this suggested that participants adjusted their articulation in order to be understood in the relatively unfamiliar video-mediated environment. Interlocutors in a video-mediated conversational setting were also less collaborative and less coordinated in the way they established common ground compared with participants communicating in a face-to-face setting. Speakers may have felt socially distant (Short, Williams and Christie, 1976) from their interlocutor and the communicative situation in a video-mediated setting. The findings of this research imply a distinction between consciously controlled processes and automatic processes. Characteristics of spoken dialogue, such as the setting in which a conversation takes place or the cognitive load associated with the communicative task or goal, are more likely to impact on consciously controlled processes than automatic processes. Thus, for example, when participants in a dialogue converse in the usual face-to-face manner and where the cognitive demands associated with the communicative task are relatively low, interlocutors tend to be relatively collaborative in their communication (Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986; Pickering and Garrod, in press). However, when the communicative circumstances are less than ideal, because the conversational setting is unfamiliar, or because time is short, then complex facets of spoken discourse, such as collaborating with one's interlocutor to establish common ground, may be disrupted. An adequate account of spoken dialogue must account for the effect of dynamic aspects of dialogue such as where the conversation takes place and the cognitive demands associated with the communicative task or goal

A cross-linguistic study on turn-taking and temporal alignment in verbal interaction

Kousidis S, Schlangen D, Skopeteas S. A cross-linguistic study on turn-taking and temporal alignment in verbal interaction. In: Proceedings of Interspeech 2013. 2013