Language-Related Communications Challenges in General Aviation Operations and Pilot Training

English is the basis for aviation communications worldwide creating challenges for both native and non-native English speakers. An unfortunate outcome of language-related communications issues, whether indirectly or directly, has been aircraft mishaps. As aviation grows worldwide, the potential for miscommunication increases. Previous studies have concentrated on commercial aviation accident analysis. A similar focus on general aviation operations and pilot training incidents in the U.S. is needed. Voluntary incident reporting is a key component in Safety Management Systems in order to address problems before they become accidents. This project studied voluntary incident reports to analyze the number of language-related reports filed and whether common themes were present in the reports. Using a quantitative and qualitative approach, publicly available reports from the Aviation Safety Reporting System spanning the years 2008-2018 were explored for language-related communications issues with a specific focus on pilot training incidents. The search yielded 108 reports containing information about language-related communications problems, 38 of those reports related to pilot training. The dearth of reports suggests incidents are likely underreported. What is available indicates a need for better incident reporting and information sharing and a need for pilots and controllers to better understand roles and responsibilities for communicating using Aviation English. This study adds to the growing body of research indicating a need to educate native English speaking aviators on their responsibility to assist non-native English speakers and adopt better coping strategies to adapt to a changing language paradigm

LHUFT Bibliography January 2020

Subject headings have been updated to reflect current Library of Congress standards

The effects of interruptions on decision-making with applications in medicine

From a child interrupting a conversation between her parents to ask "What's for dinner?" to a nurse interrupting a physician in the middle of a complex procedure with an urgent message, interruptions are an inevitable part of our daily lives no matter who we are, where we live, or what we do. Interruptions can have a variety of affects on people's performance and behavior. While interruptions may sometimes facilitate performance, often interruptions have negative consequences. For example, interruptions may result in people making more errors or forgetting to complete a prior task altogether. This thesis examines existing strategies to help mitigate interruption costs and explores the effects of interruptions within different decision environments. Chapter I introduces the topic by discussing a few theoretical frameworks of interruptions and reviewing prior research on what makes interruptions disruptive. One strategy to minimize interruption costs is to use what is called an interruption lag, which can be thought of as taking time to prepare for a pending interruption. Chapter II presents a novel experiment to systematically explore the potential benefits of interruptions lags and an alternative intervention (i.e. providing feedback) when interruption lags are not possible. Chapters III and IV discuss the results from three experiments and a final replication study that all focus on how interruptions affect people's decision making in unique environments. The environments consist of easy problems (i.e. basic arithmetic problems) and trick problems, designed in such a way to lead the reader down an incorrect path. Results from these studies were mixed. While there was some evidence that interruptions may make people more susceptible to falling for the trick answer, this finding was inconsistent across all the experiments. Chapter V applies the findings from the previous chapters to a medical context. This chapter presents novel medical cases that were developed with the help of a medical expert. These cases consisted of easy, hard, and trick cases designed for medical students. The goals of this chapter were to validate the cases and to investigate the effects of interruptions within the different case types. The final chapter (Chapter VI) concludes with a general discussion of the experimental findings, the theoretical implications of the results, and the broader implications of this research for the field of medicine

Audible Voice in Context

The term audible voice refers to the sound of the text experienced by the reader during silent reading. It was coined by Elbow in his Landmark Essays to help the field of composition wrestle more productively with the concept of voice in writing. In this dissertation, voice is not a metaphor. Drawing on contemporary work in psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and consciousness studies, it examines the phenomenon of audible voice as a form of inner speech[1]. The premise of this study is that the experience of audible voice by the reader is a unique intersection of the individual\u27s inner landscape and the features of the text at a particular moment in time. Therefore, the phenomenology of audible voice is best explored in context, the context of a single individual responding to a specific text. This dissertation presents the results of a mixed-methods study designed to explore the following questions in context: (1) What do readers hear or experience when they read silently? (2) What do writers hear or experience when they write? For scholars studying inner speech and the experience of voice, the value of this study lies in its detailed description of the phenomenology of inner speech during reading and writing in context. For composition-rhetoric scholars, this study is intended as a stepping-stone along a path towards an understanding of style and voice in writing that is centered in the inner experience of individual readers and writers. This lens is critical given the diversity of inner landscapes described in this work, a glimpse into the potential for an invisible diversity that may be present in our classrooms. [1] Also known as inner voice and inner speaking

Eleventh Annual Conference on Manual Control

Human operator performance and servomechanism analyses for manual vehicle control tasks are studied