The acquisition of melodic form and meaning in yes-no interrogatives by Catalan and Spanish speaking children

This study investigates the link between interrogative intonation and meaning in child-directed speech (henceforth CDS) and how this is reflected in the early development of yes-no-interrogatives of Catalan- and Spanish-speaking children. Previous research found that children before the two-word period produce several types of interrogatives and that their productions generally reflect the adult inventory pattern (Lleó & Rakow 2011; Prieto et al. 2012). Yet prior studies have not included an analysis of the pragmatic meanings that are encoded intonationally. This investigation takes an integrated approach to the study of intonational development within the domain of yes-no questions, exploring further the correspondence between intonational form and meaning in early interrogative production and relating it to the pragmatics of interrogative intonation in child-directed speech. A set of 723 interrogative utterances produced by 3 Catalan- and 2 Spanish-acquiring children between the onset of interrogative production and 2;4 were pragmatically and then prosodically analyzed, as well as a set of 867 utterances from Catalan and Spanish CDS. The data were extracted from the Serra-Solé Catalan Corpus and the Ojea and López-Ornat Spanish Corpora in CHILDES. Production results show that all children perform some instance of questioning before the two-word period and that their productions generally reflect the adult inventory patterns. Moreover, the results show a preference relationship between the different types of nuclear pitch configurations and the pragmatic meanings that underlie the yes-no-interrogative forms. Finally, these results highlight the importance of the assessment of form-meaning relationships for the understanding of intonational development

An Investigation of Pre-Service English Language Teacher Attitudes towards Varieties of English in Interaction

English has become the default language of global communication, and users around the world are adapting the traditional standards of grammar and interaction. It is imperative that teachers of English keep pace with these changing conceptualizations of the language as well as the changing expectations of its users so that they can best prepare language learners for the sociolinguistic realities they will encounter. Teacher training programs have a critical role to play in that they must keep pace with both the changing global linguistic landscape and how these changes influence pre-service teachers. It is therefore imperative to understand the attitudes of pre-service teachers towards the varieties of English that their students will encounter. This study considers the attitudes of pre-service TESOL teachers towards varieties of native and non-native English as used in naturalistic communicative situations. It considers personal factors that may play a role in how participants evaluate the interactive speech samples and whether TESOL training programs influence the development of attitudes towards language-in-use. To this end, a mixed methods design involving three primary components was used: an online survey of 70 respondents from 26 institutions, four focus group interviews, and a curriculum analysis of five teacher training programs. This study is unique in that participants evaluate speech-in-action that is representative of the types of language found in many English as a lingua franca (ELF) settings. Among other things, primary results suggest that (a) standard language ideology influences many participant assessments of both native and non-native speech, (b) teacher training programs exert at least some influence on the attitudes of pre-service teachers towards varieties of spoken English in discourse, and (c) engagement with non-native speech in teacher preparation courses and language learning as a component of a curriculum can benefit pre-service teachers. Implications for applied linguistics, teacher training, and ELF are considere

Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

The core use of language is in face-to-face conversation. This is characterized by rapid turn-taking. This turn-taking poses a number central puzzles for the psychology of language. Consider, for example, that in large corpora the gap between turns is on the order of 100 to 300 ms, but the latencies involved in language production require minimally between 600ms (for a single word) or 1500 ms (for as simple sentence). This implies that participants in conversation are predicting the ends of the incoming turn and preparing in advance. But how is this done? What aspects of this prediction are done when? What happens when the prediction is wrong? What stops participants coming in too early? If the system is running on prediction, why is there consistently a mode of 100 to 300 ms in response time? The timing puzzle raises further puzzles: it seems that comprehension must run parallel with the preparation for production, but it has been presumed that there are strict cognitive limitations on more than one central process running at a time. How is this bottleneck overcome? Far from being 'easy' as some psychologists have suggested, conversation may be one of the most demanding cognitive tasks in our everyday lives. Further questions naturally arise: how do children learn to master this demanding task, and what is the developmental trajectory in this domain? Research shows that aspects of turn-taking such as its timing are remarkably stable across languages and cultures, but the word order of languages varies enormously. How then does prediction of the incoming turn work when the verb (often the informational nugget in a clause) is at the end? Conversely, how can production work fast enough in languages that have the verb at the beginning, thereby requiring early planning of the whole clause? What happens when one changes modality, as in sign languages -- with the loss of channel constraints is turn-taking much freer? And what about face-to-face communication amongst hearing individuals -- do gestures, gaze, and other body behaviors facilitate turn-taking? One can also ask the phylogenetic question: how did such a system evolve? There seem to be parallels (analogies) in duetting bird species, and in a variety of monkey species, but there is little evidence of anything like this among the great apes. All this constitutes a neglected set of problems at the heart of the psychology of language and of the language sciences. This research topic welcomes contributions from right across the board, for example from psycholinguists, developmental psychologists, students of dialogue and conversation analysis, linguists interested in the use of language, phoneticians, corpus analysts and comparative ethologists or psychologists. We welcome contributions of all sorts, for example original research papers, opinion pieces, and reviews of work in subfields that may not be fully understood in other subfields

The Pitch Range of Italians and Americans. A Comparative Study

Linguistic experiments have investigated the nature of F0 span and level in cross-linguistic comparisons. However, only few studies have focused on the elaboration of a general-agreed methodology that may provide a unifying approach to the analysis of pitch range (Ladd, 1996; Patterson and Ladd, 1999; Daly and Warren, 2001; Bishop and Keating, 2010; Mennen et al. 2012). Pitch variation is used in different languages to convey different linguistic and paralinguistic meanings that may range from the expression of sentence modality to the marking of emotional and attitudinal nuances (Grice and Baumann, 2007). A number of factors have to be taken into consideration when determining the existence of measurable and reliable differences in pitch values. Daly and Warren (2001) demonstrated the importance of some independent variables such as language, age, body size, speaker sex (female vs. male), socio-cultural background, regional accents, speech task (read sentences vs. spontaneous dialogues), sentence type (questions vs. statements) and measure scales (Hertz, semitones, ERB etc.). Coherently with the model proposed by Mennen et al. (2012), my analysis of pitch range is based on the investigation of LTD (long-term distributional) and linguistic measures. LTD measures deal with the F0 distribution within a speaker’s contour (e.g. F0 minimum, F0 maximum, F0 mean, F0 median, standard deviation, F0 span) while linguistic measures are linked to specific targets within the contour, such as peaks and valleys (e.g. high and low landmarks) and preserve the temporal sequences of pitch contours. This investigation analyzed the characteristics of pitch range production and perception in English sentences uttered by Americans and Italians. Four experiments were conducted to examine different phenomena: i) the contrast between measures of F0 level and span in utterances produced by Americans and Italians (experiments 1-2); ii) the contrast between the pitch range produced by males and females in L1 and L2 (experiment 1); iii) the F0 patterns in different sentence types, that is, yes-no questions, wh-questions, and exclamations (experiment 2); iv) listeners’ evaluations of pitch span in terms of ±interesting, ±excited, ±credible, ±friendly ratings of different sentence types (experiments 3-4); v) the correlation between pitch span of the sentences and the evaluations given by American and Italian listeners (experiment 3); vi) the listeners’ evaluations of pitch span values in manipulated stimuli, whose F0 span was re-synthesized under three conditions: narrow span, original span, and wide span (experiment 4); vii) the different evaluations given to the sentences by male and female listeners. The results of this investigation supported the following generalizations. First, pitch span more than level was found to be a cue for non-nativeness, because L2 speakers of English used a narrower span, compared to the native norm. What is more, the experimental data in the production studies indicated that the mode of sentences was better captured by F0 span than level. Second, the Italian learners of English were influenced by their L1 and transferred L1 pitch range variation into their L2. The English sentences produced by the Italians had overall higher pitch levels and narrower pitch span than those produced by the Americans. In addition, the Italians used overall higher pitch levels when speaking Italian and lower levels when speaking English. Conversely, their pitch span was generally higher in English and lower in Italian. When comparing productions in English, the Italian females used higher F0 levels than the American females; vice versa, the Italian males showed slightly lower F0 levels than the American males. Third, there was a systematic relation between pitch span values and the listeners’ evaluations of the sentences. The two groups of listeners (the Americans and the Italians) rated the stimuli with larger pitch span as more interesting, exciting and credible than the stimuli with narrower pitch span. Thus, the listeners relied on the perceived pitch span to differentiate among the stimuli. Fourth, both the American and the Italian speakers were considered more friendly when the pitch span of their sentences was widened (wide span manipulation) and less friendly when the pitch span was narrowed (narrow span manipulation). This happened in all the stimuli regardless of the native language of the speakers (American vs. Italian)

Computational modeling of turn-taking dynamics in spoken conversations

The study of human interaction dynamics has been at the center for multiple research disciplines in- cluding computer and social sciences, conversational analysis and psychology, for over decades. Recent interest has been shown with the aim of designing computational models to improve human-machine interaction system as well as support humans in their decision-making process. Turn-taking is one of the key aspects of conversational dynamics in dyadic conversations and is an integral part of human- human, and human-machine interaction systems. It is used for discourse organization of a conversation by means of explicit phrasing, intonation, and pausing, and it involves intricate timing. In verbal (e.g., telephone) conversation, the turn transitions are facilitated by inter- and intra- speaker silences and over- laps. In early research of turn-taking in the speech community, the studies include durational aspects of turns, cues for turn yielding intention and lastly designing turn transition modeling for spoken dia- log agents. Compared to the studies of turn transitions very few works have been done for classifying overlap discourse, especially the competitive act of overlaps and function of silences. Given the limitations of the current state-of-the-art, this dissertation focuses on two aspects of con- versational dynamics: 1) design automated computational models for analyzing turn-taking behavior in a dyadic conversation, 2) predict the outcome of the conversations, i.e., observed user satisfaction, using turn-taking descriptors, and later these two aspects are used to design a conversational profile for each speaker using turn-taking behavior and the outcome of the conversations. The analysis, experiments, and evaluation has been done on a large dataset of Italian call-center spoken conversations where customers and agents are engaged in real problem-solving tasks. Towards solving our research goal, the challenges include automatically segmenting and aligning speakers’ channel from the speech signal, identifying and labeling the turn-types and its functional aspects. The task becomes more challenging due to the presence of overlapping speech. To model turn- taking behavior, the intension behind these overlapping turns needed to be considered. However, among all, the most critical question is how to model observed user satisfaction in a dyadic conversation and what properties of turn-taking behavior can be used to represent and predict the outcome. Thus, the computational models for analyzing turn-taking dynamics, in this dissertation includes au- tomatic segmenting and labeling turn types, categorization of competitive vs non-competitive overlaps, silences (e.g., lapse, pauses) and functions of turns in terms of dialog acts. The novel contributions of the work presented here are to 1. design of a fully automated turn segmentation and labeling (e.g., agent vs customer’s turn, lapse within the speaker, and overlap) system. 2. the design of annotation guidelines for segmenting and annotating the speech overlaps with the competitive and non-competitive labels. 3. demonstrate how different channels of information such as acoustic, linguistic, and psycholin- guistic feature sets perform in the classification of competitive vs non-competitive overlaps. 4. study the role of speakers and context (i.e., agents’ and customers’ speech) for conveying the information of competitiveness for each individual feature set and their combinations. 5. investigate the function of long silences towards the information flow in a dyadic conversation. The extracted turn-taking cues is then used to automatically predict the outcome of the conversation, which is modeled from continuous manifestations of emotion. The contributions include 1. modeling the state of the observed user satisfaction in terms of the final emotional manifestation of the customer (i.e., user). 2. analysis and modeling turn-taking properties to display how each turn type influence the user satisfaction. 3. study of how turn-taking behavior changes within each emotional state. Based on the studies conducted in this work, it is demonstrated that turn-taking behavior, specially competitiveness of overlaps, is more than just an organizational tool in daily human interactions. It represents the beneficial information and contains the power to predict the outcome of the conversation in terms of satisfaction vs not-satisfaction. Combining the turn-taking behavior and the outcome of the conversation, the final and resultant goal is to design a conversational profile for each speaker. Such profiled information not only facilitate domain experts but also would be useful to the call center agent in real time. These systems are fully automated and no human intervention is required. The findings are po- tentially relevant to the research of overlapping speech and automatic analysis of human-human and human-machine interactions

A Study of Accomodation of Prosodic and Temporal Features in Spoken Dialogues in View of Speech Technology Applications

Inter-speaker accommodation is a well-known property of human speech and human interaction in general. Broadly it refers to the behavioural patterns of two (or more) interactants and the effect of the (verbal and non-verbal) behaviour of each to that of the other(s). Implementation of thisbehavior in spoken dialogue systems is desirable as an improvement on the naturalness of humanmachine interaction. However, traditional qualitative descriptions of accommodation phenomena do not provide sufficient information for such an implementation. Therefore, a quantitativedescription of inter-speaker accommodation is required. This thesis proposes a methodology of monitoring accommodation during a human or humancomputer dialogue, which utilizes a moving average filter over sequential frames for each speaker. These frames are time-aligned across the speakers, hence the name Time Aligned Moving Average (TAMA). Analysis of spontaneous human dialogue recordings by means of the TAMA methodology reveals ubiquitous accommodation of prosodic features (pitch, intensity and speech rate) across interlocutors, and allows for statistical (time series) modeling of the behaviour, in a way which is meaningful for implementation in spoken dialogue system (SDS) environments.In addition, a novel dialogue representation is proposed that provides an additional point of view to that of TAMA in monitoring accommodation of temporal features (inter-speaker pause length and overlap frequency). This representation is a percentage turn distribution of individual speakercontributions in a dialogue frame which circumvents strict attribution of speaker-turns, by considering both interlocutors as synchronously active. Both TAMA and turn distribution metrics indicate that correlation of average pause length and overlap frequency between speakers can be attributed to accommodation (a debated issue), and point to possible improvements in SDS “turntaking” behaviour. Although the findings of the prosodic and temporal analyses can directly inform SDS implementations, further work is required in order to describe inter-speaker accommodation sufficiently, as well as to develop an adequate testing platform for evaluating the magnitude ofperceived improvement in human-machine interaction. Therefore, this thesis constitutes a first step towards a convincingly useful implementation of accommodation in spoken dialogue systems

Enunciative identity in elementary English as a foreign language

How to improve the skill of speaking English is a major challenge for English learners in Taiwan nowadays. This project focuses on issues of pronunciation as the starting point to examine the problems of learning English, and issues of identity transformation in the language-learning process. Then it addresses the concept of enunciation as a way to facilitate English learners to establish their confidence in, and ownership of, the target language. This project is designed not only for discussing issues of improving the teaching and learning of English pronunciation, but also for explicating how students can gain their own voices and define their subjectivity during their English-learning process