chapter 07_Discourse.pdf

DISCOURSE  This is the technical term we use to refer to speech structured at the highest level.  Discourse Conversation (We shift between periods of turn taking as listener and...

DISCOURSE  This is the technical term we use to refer to speech structured at the highest level.  Discourse Conversation (We shift between periods of turn taking as listener and speaker) Narrative (Periods when one speaker dominates the conversation) Conversation  Discourse is a set of sentences that cohere about one or more related topics. a) Conversation is the most common form of discourse. b) It has added feature of being a collaborative process between two or more participant who take terms in orderly fashion.  A conversation is far more than a set of sentences produced by alternating speakers.  Incomplete and ill-formed utterances are the norm in spontaneous conversation.  We often experience processing delay during which we buy time with conventional fillers, words like “uh” and “um” that are semantically empty but are used to signal planning difficulties.  Ill formed utterances also result from planning errors. Often times speakers will simply drop a structure in mid-sentence and start anew. Speakers will preserve with an errant sentence, attempting to steer it back to the intended message by tracking on additional phrases and clauses.  Most of the meaning of a conversation resides not in the semantics of the individual words but rather in the pragmatics of the situation in which the conversation is taking place. a) Participants observe the principle of no gaps/no overlaps at turn transition. b) Turn-constructional unit is a syntactic structure, ranging from single word to a sentence than can make up a turn in a conversation.  The listener plays an active role in a conversation by providing the speaker with backchannels that indicates points of understanding and confusion, thus helping to establish common ground and encouraging the speaker to continue. a) Backchannels are signals like “mmhmm” and “uhhuh” from the listener indicate engagement and encourage the speaker to continue. b) Overlaps are instances when multiple interlocators speak at the same time.  Turn allocation proceeds stepwise through three rules. a) The current speaker selects the next speaker.  b) A listener self-selects. c) The current speaker self-selects the process the cycles through step 2 and 3 until a new turn begins.  Participants in a conversation tend to match each other in terms of body movements, breathing rates and speech patterns in a process known as entrainment. a) It is believed the endogenous oscillators, or neural circuits with regular firing rates are responsible for entrainment. Narrative and references  Conversation and narratives form two ends of a discourse continuum. a) In case of conversation, interlocutors take turns constructing the discourse. b) In case of narratives, one interlocutor dominates as narrator, although listeners still play an important role as co-narrators.  Storytelling is cognitively demanding because the speaker and listener need to distance themselves from the here and now (decontextualization) as well as create and maintain a situation model of the narrative a) Thus producing and comprehending narratives require executive functions such as memory allocation, planning and inhibition.  Story grammar provides the frame work for narratives a) A story consists of one or more episodes that depend for their construction and comprehension on the schemas we have about how the world works.  Reference is the process of using a word or phrase to represent an entity. a) Speakers need to judge what is in common or privileged ground when crafting referring expressions and likewise listeners consider common and privileged ground in the interpretation of those referring expressions.  Relevance theory proposes that speakers strike a balance between too much and too little information in selecting referring expressions. a) Likewise listeners assume that referring expressions are optimally relevant when interpreting them.  Interlocutors collaborate to lone referring expressions a) Clinical evidence suggest that implicit learning plays a more important role in building common ground than does explicit learning. Anaphora and Inference  Repeated name penalty - is a delay in processing when the same referring expression is used on multiple consecutive occasions in a narrative.  An anaphor is a word or phrase that refers back to an antecedent in discourse.  a) Anaphors are memory retrieval cues, and the proper use of anaphora considerably eases the listener’s comprehension of the discourse.  The type of anaphor that a speaker chooses depends in part on the antecedents givenness, or the degree to which it is likely to be within the memory and attention span of the listener.  We avoid the repeated name penalty by using a category anaphor, which is a noun- phrase anaphor that names the category that the antecedent is a member of.  Noun-phrase anaphors that are more general in meaning are typically easier to process than those that are more specific.  The next degree of anaphor is the pronoun. The speaker uses pronoun as often as possible to reduce cognitive costs. The listeners assume that a noun-pronoun anaphor where they’d expected a pronoun signals something important such as introduction of a new entry into the narrative or else a shift of focus.  Pronouns convey minimal semantic content and provides nothing more than gender and number.  The last degree of anaphor is zero anaphor in which no overt anaphor is used even though anaphoric reference can easily be inferred.  Cohesion refers to the use of linguistic devices such as anaphors to bind the sentence of a discourse. a) Coherence refers to the use of schemas content of the child’s utterance with repetitions and elaborations.  Some children with developmental language delay eventually catch up with the peers, but many experience disruptions of their socialization process. a) Although their turn taking behavior is normal, their utterances are brief, marked by ellipsis and formulaic expressions, and they provide little content for caregivers to elaborate on.  There are two types of cospeech gesture: a) Indexial-gestures are used to point to objects in the environment are referents in conversations. b) Iconic-gestures are used to imitate actions. Iconic gestures tend to line up at the clause level in adult speech, and children do not master language-specific gesture patterns until grade school years.  Although children are sensitive to the emotional content of prosody when heard in isolation, they tend to ignore it when it conflicts with the semantics of an utterance. a) As a result, they are prone to interpreting utterances literally. b) They are however adapt at inferring speaker intentions from context cues.  Use of the Gricean maxims sometimes leads adults to make inferences that are not logical valid (although they are pragmatically sound). a) Because it takes years for children to learn the Gricean maxims, they are some cases, as in the interpretation of quantity words like “some and all”, where child think more rationally than adult.  In specific language impairment, deficits in syntax and “expressive” vocabulary affect the ability to construct coherent discourse. a) In pragmatic language impairment, the child displays no structural language difficulties but struggles with the social and pragmatic aspects of discourse, which lead to various behavioral disorders.