The stylometry of film dialogue : pros and pitfalls

We examine film dialogue with quantitative textual analysis (stylometry, sentiment analysis, distant reading). Working with transcribed dialogue in almost 300 productions, we explore the complex way in which most-frequent-words-based stylometry and lexicon-based sentiment analysis produce patterns of similarity and difference between screenwriters and/or a priori IMDB-defined genres. In fact, some of our results show that counting and comparing very frequent word lists reveals further similarities: of theme, implied audience, stylistic patternings. The results are encouraging enough to suggest that such quantitative approach to film dialogue may become a welcome addition to the arsenal of film studies methodology

Affect-based information retrieval

One of the main challenges Information Retrieval (IR) systems face nowadays originates from the semantic gap problem: the semantic difference between a user’s query representation and the internal representation of an information item in a collection. The gap is further widened when the user is driven by an ill-defined information need, often the result of an anomaly in his/her current state of knowledge. The formulated search queries, which are submitted to the retrieval systems to locate relevant items, produce poor results that do not address the users’ information needs. To deal with information need uncertainty IR systems have employed in the past a range of feedback techniques, which vary from explicit to implicit. The first category of feedback techniques necessitates the communication of explicit relevance judgments, in return for better query reformulations and recommendations of relevant results. However, the latter happens at the expense of users’ cognitive resources and, furthermore, introduces an additional layer of complexity to the search process. On the other hand, implicit feedback techniques make inferences on what is relevant based on observations of user search behaviour. By doing so, they disengage users from the cognitive burden of document rating and relevance assessments. However, both categories of RF techniques determine topical relevance with respect to the cognitive and situational levels of interaction, failing to acknowledge the importance of emotions in cognition and decision making. In this thesis I investigate the role of emotions in the information seeking process and develop affective feedback techniques for interactive IR. This novel feedback framework aims to aid the search process and facilitate a more natural and meaningful interaction. I develop affective models that determine topical relevance based on information gathered from various sensory channels, and enhance their performance using personalisation techniques. Furthermore, I present an operational video retrieval system that employs affective feedback to enrich user profiles and offers meaningful recommendations of unseen videos. The use of affective feedback as a surrogate for the information need is formalised as the Affective Model of Browsing. This is a cognitive model that motivates the use of evidence extracted from the psycho-somatic mobilisation that occurs during cognitive appraisal. Finally, I address some of the ethical and privacy issues that arise from the social-emotional interaction between users and computer systems. This study involves questionnaire data gathered over three user studies, from 74 participants of different educational background, ethnicity and search experience. The results show that affective feedback is a promising area of research and it can improve many aspects of the information seeking process, such as indexing, ranking and recommendation. Eventually, it may be that relevance inferences obtained from affective models will provide a more robust and personalised form of feedback, which will allow us to deal more effectively with issues such as the semantic gap

Language & Normativity in Sexuality & Gender-Related Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: a Netnographic-Informed Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study.

PhD ThesesPsychologists generally agree that obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is caused by intrinsic biopsychological factors and extrinsic sociocultural factors that influence the topic of obsessions (e.g., cleanliness, symmetry, harm, blasphemy, sexuality). Previous research on sociocultural factors has favoured quantitative approaches that correlate the prevalence of OCD sub-types to specific cultures or geographical areas. However, this work has not considered sufferers’ own perspectives. This thesis examines sufferers’ discursive understandings of sexual orientation OCD (SO-OCD) and gender identity OCD (GI-OCD) in order to develop a more nuanced account of how external forces influence individuals’ experiences of OCD. In doing so, the thesis aims to outline a more critical and qualitative approach to the exploration of sociocultural factors, and to demonstrate the utility of ethnographic and discourse-based methodologies in OCD research. Data are drawn from a year-long netnography on a bespoke online forum. Ethnographic insights were triangulated with corpus-assisted discourse analysis to uncover how normativity was discursively negotiated among 70 forum participants who wrote in total ca. 343,000 words. A detailed collocation analysis of 14 selected words revealed how OCD sufferers draw on sociocultural Discourses of gender, sexuality, and psychotherapy to construct their identities. Combining queer theory, a Foucauldian approach to discourse and governmentality, and cognitive theories of the self, the thesis argues that, within a sociocultural frame that values essentialized understandings of identity, participants engaged in a quest of a “pure” self, by regulating the conceptual boundaries of their identities. This includes a tendency to orient to extreme, and/or stereotypical forms of cis-heteronormative assumptions about gender and sexuality (even among LGBTQA+ participants), and to embrace particular cognitive-behavioural understandings of OCD, while distancing from psychoanalytical theories. Overall, results interrogate certain assumptions regarding the sociocultural factors that cause SO-/GI-OCD, and contribute to theoretical and methodological discussions of normativity, and corpus-assisted discourse studies more broadly

Sociophonetics of popular music: insights from corpus analysis and speech perception experiments

This thesis examines the flexibility and context-sensitivity of speech perception by looking at a domain not often explored in the study of language cognition — popular music. Three empirical studies are presented. The first examines the current state of sociolinguistic variation in commercial popular music, while the second and third explore everyday listeners’ perception of language in musical and non-musical contexts. The foundational assumption of the thesis is that the use of ‘American English’ in song is automatic for New Zealand singers, and constitutes a responsive style that is both accurate and consistent. The use of New Zealand English in song, by contrast, is stylised, involving an initiative act of identity and requiring effort and awareness. This will be discussed in Chapter 1, where I also introduce the term Standard Popular Music Singing Style (SPMSS) to refer to the US English-derived phonetic style dominant in popular song. The first empirical study will be presented in Chapter 2. Using a systematically selected corpus of commercial pop and hip hop from NZ and the USA, analysis of non-prevocalic and linking /r/, and the vowels of the bath, lot and goat lexical sets confirm that SPMSS is highly normative in NZ music. Most pop singers closely follow US patterns, while several hip hop artists display elements of New Zealand English. This reflects the value placed on authenticity in hip hop, and also interacts with ethnicity, showing the use of different authentication practices by P¯akeh¯a (NZ European) and M¯aori/Pasifika artists. By looking at co-variation amongst the variables, I explore both the apparent identity goals of the artists, and the relative salience of the variables. Chapters 3 and 4 use the results of the corpus analysis to explore how the dominance of SPMSS affects speech processing. The first of the two perception experiments is a phonetic categorisation task. Listeners decide whether they hear the word bed or bad in a condition where the stimuli are either set to music, or appear in one of two non-musical control conditions. The stimuli are on a resynthesised continuum between the dress and trap vowels, passing through an F1 space where the vowel is ambiguous and could either be perceived as a spoken NZE trap or a sung dress. When set to music, the NZ listeners perceive the vowel according to expectations of SPMSS (i.e. expecting US-derived vowel qualities). The second perception experiment is a lexical decision task that uses the natural speech of a NZ and a US speaker, once again in musical and non-musical conditions. Participants’ processing of the US voice is facilitated in the music condition, becoming faster than reaction times to their native dialect. Bringing the results of the corpus and perception studies together, this thesis shows that SPMSS is highly normative in NZ popular music not just for performers, but also in the minds of the general music-listening public. I argue that many New Zealanders are bidialectal, with native-like knowledge of SPMSS. Speech and song are two highly distinct and perceptually contrastive contexts of language use. By differing from conversational language across a range of perceptual and cognitive dimensions, language heard or produced in song is likely to encode and activate a distinct subset of auditory memories. The contextual specificity of such networks may then allow for the abstraction of an independent sub-system of sociophonetic knowledge specific to the musical context

Experience and learning in cross-dialect perception: Derhoticised /r/ in Glasgow

It is well known that unfamiliar accents can be difficult to understand. Previous research has investigated the effect of hearing e.g. foreign-accented speech, but relatively little research has been conducted on the effect of hearing an unfamiliar native English accent. This thesis investigates how listeners process fine phonetic detail for a phonological contrast, measuring their perceptual efficiency depending on their level of experience with the working class Glaswegian dialect. In Glasgow, speakers are stereotypically rhotic. However, recent sociophonetic research indicates a trend towards derhoticisation (the phonetic erosion of postvocalic /r/ in working class Glaswegian speech). The potential for misperception exists when listeners hear minimal pairs such as 'hut/hurt', when spoken by working class speakers who realise postvocalic /r/ as an acoustically ambiguous variant, with delayed tongue tip gesture and early tongue body gesture. This makes derhoticised /r/ perceptually very similar to the preceding open back vowel in both 'hut' and 'hurt', leading to difficulty when listeners try to distinguish between /CʌC/ and /CʌrC/ words in general. This thesis begins with a novel dynamic acoustic analysis of the key cues for rhoticity in Glaswegian for such words, demonstrating that minimal pairs such as 'hut/hurt' are acoustically very similar in the Glaswegian working class accent, but remain distinct for middle class speakers. A suite of listening experiments is then described. Experiment 1 was conceived and run as a pilot study to this work, but new analysis of the data assessed the influence of long-term learning, using Signal Detection Theory as a key analytical tool. This showed strong effects of listener familiarity in both sensitivity and response bias. Experiment 2 tested listeners' ability to learn the distinction between 'hut' and 'hurt' word types, with Response Time and Signal Detection analyses finding that listeners least familiar with the accent very quickly matched the response patterns of listeners with an intermediate level of experience. However, neither listener group was able to match the performance of listeners most familiar with the accent, who were native to Glasgow, suggesting that acoustic phonetic detail plays an important role in perception, with interesting interactions with listener experience. Finally, for Experiment 3 the overarching purpose shifts from offline to online perception. The results of the acoustic analysis showed that dynamics are key, so Experiment 3, a Mouse Tracking experiment, allows for the measurement of dynamic perceptual responses – in a listening context which is more difficult – for the most experienced listeners. It yielded results in terms of Response Time, and two sets of measures capturing cursor trajectories, Area Under the Curve, and Discrete Cosine Transformation. Taken together, the results of these analyses reveal that even for the most experienced listeners (Glaswegians), the phonetically ambiguous tokens present perceptual challenges when hearing working class Glaswegian 'hut' and 'hurt' words, and also demonstrated that challenging listening conditions lead to processing costs, even for the ‘easiest’ stimuli; i.e. when hearing talkers and accents randomised together. This thesis examines a single difficult phonological contrast, with the simplicity of the linguistic scope affording an extremely in-depth analysis. Not only did this provide a clear insight into the perception of the contrast itself, but the depth of analysis allows for a more sophisticated discussion of the results, potentially speaking to wider theoretical standpoints. The results have implications for theories of speech perception, as they may be explained by some general principles which underlie exemplar theories and Bayesian inference. They also constitute valuable acoustic and perceptual contributions to the ongoing research into the complex and changing nature of postvocalic /r/ in Scotland

Salience and social meaning in speech production and perception

Research has shown that phonetic features can index social meaning, yet less is known about whether this phenomenon occurs in the same way in speech production and speech perception. In particular, one of the factors that most seems to affect variables’ capacity for social meaning-making is the notion of salience. This thesis addresses the question of how phonetic variation points to social meaning in speech production and perception and what role salience plays in influencing this process. I investigate these issues using a sociophonetic study of two phonetic variables currently undergoing change in the South of England – /t/-glottalling and GOOSE-fronting – as produced and perceived by adolescents at a state school and a private school in Hampshire, UK. While the former is reported to be highly salient with strong socio-indexical relations, the latter is said not to be very salient and to lack associations with speakers’ social characteristics. The production results show that /t/-glottalling displays macro-sociological variation in the community, while GOOSE-fronting varies between peer groups within the private school. Both features can be used to index stances in interaction, but this effect is much stronger for /t/-glottalling. In perception, listeners were easily able to notice glottal /t/ in auditory stimuli and consistently associated it with a set of related social meanings, yet this was not the case for fronted GOOSE. The findings have implications for our understanding of how the social meanings of phonetic variables are produced and perceived by the same individuals, especially in the contexts of adolescent peer groups at school and social stratification between different types of school. I argue that researchers employing the construct of salience in sociolinguistics should acknowledge the limitations and different dimensions of the concept and operationalise these in their study design

Child L2 phonology acquisition under the influence of multiple varieties

PhD ThesisInput variability is vividly present even in L1 acquisition contexts (Foulkes and Docherty 2006), let alone in an FL/ L2 context where learners are exposed to input in one form from fellow students, to a different variety from the local teacher, and possibly another variety from the institutional model which typically represents the “native-standard norm” (Cook 2008; Regan 2013). However, little is currently known about (second) language acquisition in relation to input multiplicity (cf. Siegel 2010). In fact, it is unclear how L2 acquisition models such as the Speech Learning Model (Flege 1995) or Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) cope with input comprising multiple varieties. Against this backdrop, this study set out to investigate the nature of child L2 phonology acquisition under the influence of multiple varieties and its interface with sociolinguistic factors in Hong Kong (HK). The study looks at L2 English phonology acquisition by Hong Kong Cantonese children when various varieties are present. Specifically, it targets youngsters exposed to Filipino-accented English from live-in housekeepers in addition to the school and community input encompassing UK, US, and HK varieties. Results show that the 31 kindergarteners in their third year of studies aged 4;6 to 6, and the 29 first year secondary school students aged 11 to 14 who had received/were still receiving Filipino-accented English significantly outperformed 34 age-matched controls who were not exposed to such input on a picture-choosing task and a sound discrimination AX3 task targeting Filipino English plosives /p,t,k/ and fricatives /f,v/ (plosive onsets are often unaspirated while /f,v/ are sometimes rendered as [p,b] respectively in this variety (Tayao 2008)). These findings confirm predictions made by L2 speech acquisition theories in that the acquisition of L2 phonology is possible given a sufficient amount of exposure to the target language input. iii However, participants did not produce this variety in the production part of the experiment (a picture naming and a pair matching task) despite showing signs of perceptual knowledge. In addition, a separate instrument (verbal-guise technique) tapping into informants’ attitude towards Filipino-accented English reveals ambivalent attitudes towards this variety, making it challenging for one to resort to speech accommodation (Beebe and Giles 1984) or speech design models (Bell 1984; 2001) for an adequate explanation. This study highlights the complexity involved when multiple varieties are present in the acquisition context, which is arguably the norm rather than the exception in this current age of unprecedented geographic, social, and occupational mobility (Chambers 2002). It also reminds us of the importance of scrutinising from several perspectives the nature of input in L2 phonology (Moyer 2011; Piske and Young-Scholten 2009). Without a clear understanding of the diversity present in the input, it is difficult to make any solid claims about learners’ phonological competence in a given target language. In addition, the seemingly conflicting results on the perceptual and production parts of the study underline how essential it is to analyse the acquisition outcome from several perspectives through task triangulation

Language behaviour and the contributing factors towards it among the Georgian ethnic minorities in Luton

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyThis study investigated the Georgian language behaviour and contributing factors to this language behaviour among the Georgian ethnic minorities in Luton (UK). Attention was paid to the following: language choice and code-switching as the language behaviour phenomena in bi-/multilingual context. Research into language behaviour explored age-related behaviour, attitudes towards maintaining the Georgian language, social networks including closest and non-closest ties in the UK and outside the UK, and participants’ perceptions of their identity (ethnicity). Forty-two individuals were approached to participate in this sociolinguistic and partly ethnographic study, employing mixed-methods approach conveyed in the questionnaire, interview and observation data collection formats. The research results indicate consistent links between the language behaviour and contributing factors to the language behaviour – social networks, age, language maintenance and identity. It was found that language choices, as well as code-switching, depend on other factors too, such as their interlocutors, environment, activity, choice of topic, length of utterances, language fluency, which varied across the age groups, hence language choice and code-switching patterns. Language shift was found in a non-indigenous member of the Georgian community. Accommodation took place in the observed interactions whilst participants converged or diverged in their speech. Code-switching instances varied across the age groups with different speakers. It was found that they code-switch either intentionally or spontaneously. Various types of code-alterations were found in participants’ speech, such as inter- and intra-sentential code-switching, and intra-word code-switching. The stronger networks participants had with Georgians, the more they used Georgian. It was evident that participants try to maintain Georgian and preserve their identity through their language, culture and networks and vice versa- maintain their identity and social networks through their language