Offscreen and in the chair next to your: conversational agents speaking through actual human bodies

his paper demonstrates how to interact with a conversational agent that speaks through an actual human body face-to-face and in person (i.e., offscreen). This is made possible by the cyranoid method: a technique involving a human person speech shadowing for a remote third-party (i.e., receiving their words via a covert audio-relay apparatus and repeating them aloud in real-time). When a person shadows for an artificial conversational agent source, we call the resulting hybrid an “echoborg.” We report a study in which people encountered conversational agents either through a human shadower face-to-face or via a text interface under conditions where they assumed their interlocutor to be an actual person. Our results show that the perception of a conversational agent is dramatically altered when the agent is voiced by an actual, tangible person. We discuss the potential implications this methodology has for the development of conversational agents and general person perception research

Speech shadowing as a teaching technique in the CFL classroom

Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie "speech shadowing" (powtarzania słów, fraz lub zdań zaraz po ich usłyszeniu) jako skutecznej techniki nauczania. "Shadowing" jest techniką stosowaną na lekcjach języka angielskiego w Japonii od dziesięcioleci. Wiele badań potwierdziło jej skuteczność w rozwijaniu umiejętności rozumienia ze słuchu i wymowy uczniów. Mimo że badania wskazywały, że technika ta jest także z powodzeniem stosowana w nauczaniu języka chińskiego jako języka obcego (CFL) (Zajdler & Chu 2019), jej potencjał nie jest w Polsce szeroko wykorzystany. Dlatego w niniejszym artykule najpierw omówione zostaną audytywne i kognitywne podstawy techniki "shadowing", a następnie zaproponowana zostanie klasyfikacja rodzajów "speech shadowing". Na zakończenie przedstawione zostaną praktyczne aspekty stosowania techniki "shadowing" w nauczania chińskiego jako obcego w klasie.The aim of this paper is to present speech shadowing (the listener’s repetition of a word, phrase or sentence immediately after hearing it) as an effective teaching technique. Shadowing has been practiced in English classes in Japan for decades and many studies have confirmed its effectiveness for improving learners’ listening comprehension and pronunciation skills. Even though some studies have already indicated that this technique is successfully used in teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) (Zajdler & Chu 2019), its potential has not been widely utilized in the Chinese classroom in Poland. Thus, the present paper will first discuss the auditory and cognitive underpinnings of shadowing, then a classification of the types of shadowing will be proposed. Finally, practical aspects of shadowing as an effective in-class CFL teaching technique will be presented

Learning Model Course Choukai through Shadowing Technique

Shadowing is considered an effective way to improve listening, speaking and reading skills. This paper aims to develop a learning model choukai with shadowing techniques and to determine the effectiveness of using shadowing techniques on listening ability in choukai courses. Therefore, experimental research and data collection techniques using pre and post-tests were applied to the same group, consisting of 28 students. Then, the t-test was used to analyze the data. As a result, there was a significant difference between the pre-test and the post-test result, indicating that the Sig. (2-tailed) of 0.000 0.05, and a difference between the average student results before and after using shadowing techniques after treatmeant. In conclusion, developing of the learning model choukai using shadowing techniques on level IV students of the Japanese language education study program FKIP UHAMKA was feasible to be used by students in learning courses choukai

Penggunaan Teknik Shadowing Terhadap Kemampuan Berbicara Bahasa Jepang (Kaiwa) (Penelitian Eksperimen Mahasiswa Semester IV Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa Jepang FKIP UHAMKA)

Penelitian ini dilatar belakangi dengan masih jarangnya pemanfaatan media dalam kegiatan pembelajaran kaiwa dan masih dirasa kurang efektif serta kreatif pada saat pembelajaran sehingga pembelajar mudah jenuh. Tujuan dalam penelitian ini adalah untuk mengetahui kemampuan berbicara bahasa Jepang sebelum dan sesudah menggunakan teknik shadowing, serta mengetahui efektivitas dari teknik shadowing. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kuantitatif dengan model one-group pretest-posttest dengan memberikan tes sebelum dam sesudah perlakuan, responden dalam penelitian sebanyak 10 orang. Berdasarkan hasil perhitungan SPSS 25, diketahui bahwa nilai rata-rata hasil belajar pre-test sebesar 70,50 dan post-test sebesar 77,50. Pada tabel paired samples test dengan hasil nilai Sig (2-tailed) adalah 0,000 < 0,05, maka H0 ditolak dan Ha diterima, yang berarti terdapat pengaruh penggunaan teknik shadowing terhadap kemampuan berbicara bahasa Jepang

Phonetic Variation and Interactional Contingencies in Simultaneous Responses

An auspicious but unexplored environment for studying phonetic variation in naturalistic interaction is where two or more participants say the same thing at the same time. Working with a core dataset built from the multimodal Augmented Multi-party Interaction corpus, the principles of conversation analysis were followed to analyze the sequential organization of the talk and to explain the phonetic variation observed. Acoustic divergence and equivalence between simultaneous responses are described. Phonetic features discussed include duration and timing, pitch, loudness, and phonation type. The interactional factors that explain the acoustic divergences are established through turn-by-turn analysis and consideration of gaze direction and other visible features. It is argued that any research on phonetic variation in naturalistic talk that disregards the local organization of interaction will always be incomplete

Revisiting Milgram’s cyranoid method: experimenting with hybrid human agents

In two studies based on Stanley Milgram’s original pilots, we present the first systematic examination of cyranoids as social psychological research tools. A cyranoid is created by cooperatively joining in real-time the body of one person with speech generated by another via covert speech shadowing. The resulting hybrid persona can subsequently interact with third parties face-to-face. We show that naïve interlocutors perceive a cyranoid to be a unified, autonomously communicating person, evidence for a phenomenon Milgram termed the “cyranic illusion.” We also show that creating cyranoids composed of contrasting identities (a child speaking adult-generated words and vice versa) can be used to study how stereotyping and person perception are mediated by inner (dispositional) vs. outer (physical) identity. Our results establish the cyranoid method as a unique means of obtaining experimental control over inner and outer identities within social interactions rich in mundane realism

Spoken word processing and the effect of phonemic mismatch in aphasia

Background: There is evidence that, unlike in typical populations, initial lexical activation upon hearing spoken words in aphasic patients is not a direct reflection of the goodness of fit between the presented stimulus and the intended target. Earlier studies have mainly used short monosyllabic target words. Short words are relatively difficult to recognise because they are not highly redundant: changing one phoneme will often result in a (similar-sounding) different word. Aims: The present study aimed to investigate sensitivity of the lexical recognition system in aphasia. The focus was on longer words that contain more redundancy, to investigate whether aphasic adults might be impaired in deactivation of strongly activated lexical candidates. This was done by studying lexical activation upon presentation of spoken polysyllabic pseudowords (such as procodile) to see to what extent mismatching phonemic information leads to deactivation in the face of overwhelming support for one specific lexical candidate. Methods & Procedures: Speeded auditory lexical decision was used to investigate response time and accuracy to pseudowords with a word-initial or word-final phonemic mismatch in 21 aphasic patients and in an age-matched control group. Outcomes & Results: Results of an auditory lexical decision task showed that aphasic participants were less sensitive to phonemic mismatch if there was strong evidence for one particular lexical candidate, compared to the control group. Classifications of patients as Broca's vs Wernicke's or as fluent vs non-fluent did not reveal differences in sensitivity to mismatch between aphasia types. There was no reliable relationship between measures of auditory verbal short-term memory and lexical decision performance. Conclusions: It is argued that the aphasic results can best be viewed as lexical “overactivation” and that a verbal short-term memory account is less appropriate

Grammatical workspace sharing during language production and language comprehension: Evidence from grammatical multitasking

Grammatical encoding and grammatical decoding (in sentence production and comprehension, respectively) are often portrayed as independent modalities of grammatical performance that only share declarative resources: lexicon and grammar. The processing resources subserving these modalities are supposed to be distinct. In particular, one assumes the existence of two workspaces where grammatical structures are assembled and temporarily maintained—one for each modality. An alternative theory holds that the two modalities share many of their processing resources and postulates a single mechanism for the online assemblage and short-term storage of grammatical structures: a shared workspace. We report two experiments with a novel “grammatical multitasking” paradigm: the participants had to read (i.e., decode) and to paraphrase (encode) sentences presented in fragments, responding to each input fragment as fast as possible with a fragment of the paraphrase. The main finding was that grammatical constraints with respect to upcoming input that emanate from decoded sentence fragments are immediately replaced by grammatical expectations emanating from the structure of the corresponding paraphrase fragments. This evidences that the two modalities have direct access to, and operate upon, the same (i.e., token-identical) grammatical structures. This is possible only if the grammatical encoding and decoding processes command the same, shared grammatical workspace. Theoretical implications for important forms of grammatical multitasking—self-monitoring, turn-taking in dialogue, speech shadowing, and simultaneous translation—are explored