Attitudinal Shifts between The Newcomer and its English Translations: A Quantitative Exploration with Contextualization

Drawing on the framework of Appraisal Theory and inferential statistics, the present study examines possible attitudinal shifts between The Newcomer --- an influential Chinese short story of the communist theme and its two English translations. Such shifts are quantitatively explored in terms of the categories, block densities and prosodies of attitudinal units, revealing some typological and pragmatical features of the attitudes under translation. It is found that such attitudinal shifts may stem from certain contextual factors (e.g. linguistic distance, cultural diversity, ideological gap) that prompt the translators to adjust their translating strategies for attitudinal adaptions. Meanwhile, the effects of these attitudinal shifts upon different target readers are varied

A Review of Research on the Chinese EFL Learners’ Production of Linguistic Prosody in Turn Organization

Prosody features play crucial roles in the management and organization of conversations, among which turn-taking plays crucial roles in conversation organization. The appropriate use of prosodic features is an indispensable part of conversation strategies or skills, but the interaction between linguistic prosody and turn-taking is difficult to be acquired for EFL learners. This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical studies of interrelation between prosody and turn-taking, and the EFL learners’ acquisition of prosody in conversation organization in order to supply references for future studies in the similar fields

Intonation and variation: the multiplicity of forms and senses

This work focuses on the multiplicity of forms which the intonation patterns may have and the multiple senses they express. The background for discussing these issues is vocal gestuality taken as an index of the biological, psychological and social characteristics of the speaker. The intonation sound patterns vary according to sociolinguistic features, dialect type and speech style and they are used to express modalities, regional and social characteristics, propositional and social attitudes and affective states. The intervening factors in the relation between form and meaning are numerous and they interfere with the perception of the intonation patterns. Results from acoustic and perceptual experiments in several languages are presented and their contribution to the study of the communicative functions and variability of intonation are discussed

Going ba-na-nas: Prosodic analysis of spoken Japanese attitudes

International audienceThe aim of this paper is to examine cues for prosodic characterization of attitudes in Japanese. This work is based on previous studies where 16 communicative social affects were defined. The audio signal parameters (fundamental frequency, amplitude and duration) of previously recorded Japanese attitudes, are statistically analyzed. Interesting interactions among the parameters, the gender and the expression of specific attitude (e.g. politeness) were found, and we report on which parameters most significantly characterize each attitude. Index Terms: speech, prosody, attitude, social affect, emotional speech, Japanese languag

Persuasion prosody in prosecutor’s speech: Ukrainian and english

This paper presents the research of prosodic means conveying the persuasion modality in a prosecutor’s speech in court. The material under study consists of English and Ukrainian speeches of the prosecutors (the total duration time is 16 hours). The results of the experimental material examination demonstrate common and specific characteristics of prosody components (melody, loudness, tempo, timber and sentence stress) in English and Ukrainian. Pragmatics of prosody semantics and correlation between its parameters have been proved. It has been stated that in both English and Ukrainian an utterance becomes emphatic due to the prosodic means of persuasion in a prosecutor’s speech as follows:  1) changes of tempo; 2) changes of the pitch of a voice; 3) replacements of the rising tone with the falling one and vice versa; 4) usage of complex tones; 5) use of an interrupted ascending or descending scale; 6) change of sentence stress type; 7) division of a sense group into two or more parts. The above mentioned facts enable us to conclude that: while describing the first of these aspects of typological similarity of prosody in the compared languages, the parameters of the pitch component of intonation are most informative when differentiating attitudinal ones. The specificity of interaction between prosodic and grammar means when expressing persuasion in Ukrainian and English prosecutor’s speech is caused by a degree of distinction between the grammatical and vocabulary systems of the compared languages

Metapragmatic Evaluation of Verbal Irony by Speakers of Russian and American English

The paper discusses metapragmatic assessment of verbal irony by speakers of Russian and American English. The research combines ideas from metapragmatics, folk linguistics and corpus linguistics. Empirical data are drawn from the Russian National Corpus (RNC), the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Spontaneous evaluation of linguistic behavior is an important function of both explicit and implicit metapragmatic uses of language. Distributional adjectival patterns of the Russian word ирония and English irony are treated as implicit indicators of folk metapragmatic awareness. Connotations of the adjectives reflect our everyday linguistic practices and contribute to the vagueness of the notion and the definition of irony in scholarly theorizing

Tracking the Sound of Human Affection: EEG Signals Reveal Online Decoding of Socio-Emotional Expression in Human Speech and Voice

This chapter provides a perspective from the latest EEG evidence in how brain signals enlighten the neurophysiological and neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the recognition of socioemotional expression conveyed in human speech and voice, drawing upon event‐related potentials’ studies (ERPs). Human sound can encode emotional meanings by different vocal parameters in words, real‐ vs. pseudo‐speeches, and vocalizations. Based on the ERP findings, recent development of the three‐stage model in vocal processing has highlighted initial‐ and late‐stage processing of vocal emotional stimuli. These processes, depending on which ERP components they were mapped onto, can be divided into the acoustic analysis, relevance and motivational processing, fine‐grained meaning analysis/integration/access, and higher‐level social inference, as the unfolding of the time scale. ERP studies on vocal socioemotions, such as happiness, anger, fear, sadness, neutral, sincerity, confidence, and sarcasm in the human voice and speech have employed different experimental paradigms such as crosssplicing, crossmodality priming, oddball, stroop, etc. Moreover, task demand and listener characteristics affect the neural responses underlying the decoding processes, revealing the role of attention deployment and interpersonal sensitivity in the neural decoding of vocal emotional stimuli. Cultural orientation affects our ability to decode emotional meaning in the voice. Neurophysiological patterns were compared between normal and abnormal emotional processing in the vocal expressions, especially in schizophrenia and in congenital amusia. Future directions highlight the study on human vocal expression aligning with other nonverbal cues, such as facial and body language, and the need to synchronize listener\u27s brain potentials with other peripheral measures

Does speech prosody matter in health communication? Evidence from native and non-native English speaking medical students in a simulated clinical interaction

The impact of the UK’s multilingual and multicultural society today can be seen in its healthcare services and have contributed towards shaping communication skills training as a core part of the UK undergraduate medical curriculum. NHS complaints statistics involving perceived staff attitudes have remained high, despite extensive communication skills training. Furthermore, foreign doctors have received a higher proportion of complaints than UK doctors. Finally, how linguistic and social factors shape the conveyance and perception of attitudes related to professionalism in medical communication remains poorly understood. The ultimate aim of this study was to ascertain if speech prosody contributes to the perception of professionalism in medical communication. Research questions on the role of speech prosody in conveying professional attitudes in medical communication, the prosodic differences between native and non-native English speaking medical students in a simulated clinical interaction, and the influence of prosodic features on listeners’ perceptions of professional attitudes were addressed. A set of acoustic parameters representing the speech prosody of native and non-native medical students in the simulated clinical setting was analysed. A perceptual experiment was then carried out to investigate the factors affecting perceived professionalism in extracts of the analysed simulated clinical interaction. The examined acoustic parameters were found to be sensitive to the English language background and the task within the simulated consultation. Interestingly, the attitudinal information associated with some of these acoustic parameters were perceived by listeners and were reflected by higher professional scale scores in the perceptual experiment, even after adjusting for the English language background. The factors of training level and consultation task also emerged to be affecting professional scale scores. Initial findings have confirmed that speech prosody plays a role in terms of contributing towards the perception of professionalism in medical communication. Incorporating how messages are delivered to patients into current models of communication skills training may have positive outcomes

Experimental Approaches to Socio‐Linguistics: Usage and Interpretation of Non‐Verbal and Verbal Expressions in Cross‐ Cultural Communication

Social context shapes our behavior in interpersonal communication. In this chapter, I will address how experimental psychology contributes to the study of socio-linguistic processes, focusing on nonverbal and verbal processing in a cross-cultural or cross-linguistic communicative setting. A systematic review of the most up-to-date empirical studies will show: 1) the culturally-universal and culturally-specific encoding of emotion in speech. The acoustic cues that are commonly involved in discriminating basic emotions in vocal expressions across languages and the cross-linguistic variations in such encoding will be demonstrated; 2) the modulation of in-group and out-group status (e.g. inferred from speaker’s dialect, familiarity towards a language) on the encoding and decoding of speaker’s meaning; 3) the impact of cultural orientation and cultural learning on the interpretation of social and affective meaning, focusing on how immigration process shapes one’s language use and comprehension. I will highlight the significance of combining the research paradigms from experimental psychology with cognitive (neuro)science methodologies such as electrophysiological recording and functional magnetic resonance imaging, to address the relevant questions in cross-cultural communicative settings. The chapter is concluded by a future direction to study the socio-cultural bases of language and linguistic underpinnings of cultural behaviour