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Searching the Internet for health information is now routine; recommending and receiving medical expertise on social media platforms such as Instagram (IG) during medical treatment remains understudied. After analyzing more than 200 images on IG related to (in)fertility treatment, we employed a directed content analysis. In this manuscript, we investigate self- disclosure related to in vitro fertilization treatment on IG and the types of linguistic (e.g., written affirmations, hashtags) and paralinguistic (e.g., emoji) feedback given in response. We found users on IG received emotional (e.g., expressions of care), informational (e.g., medical and treatment advice), tangible (e.g., gifted medicine and care packages), and belonging (e.g., #ttcsisters) functions of social support in response to self-disclosure (Uchino, 2004). By concluding that social media platforms allow for unique social support exchanges, we offer theoretical and practical implications for scholars, practitioners, and patients interested in social support, supportive communication, and emoji on social media platforms.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine how tweeters drawn from three different languages and cultural boundaries manage the lack of contextual cues through an analysis of Arabic, English and Korean tweets. Design/methodology/approach Data for this study is drawn from a corpus of tweets (n = 1,200) streamed using Python through Twitter API. Using the language information, the authors limited the number of tweets to 400 randomly selected tweets from each language, totaling 1,200 tweets. Final coding taxonomy was derived through interactive processes preceded by literature and a preliminary analysis based on a small subset (n = 150) by isolating nonverbal communication devices and emoticons. Findings The results of the study present that there is great commonality across these tweets in terms of strategies and creativity in compensating for the constraints imposed by the tweet platform. The language-specific characteristics are also shown in the form of different usage of devices. Research limitations/implications Emoticon usage indicates that the communication mode influences online social interaction; the restriction of 140 maximum characters seems to engender a frequent usage of emoticons across tweets regardless of language differences. The results of the study bring forth implications into the design of social media technologies that reflect affective aspects of communication and language-/culture-specific traits and characteristics. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no qualitative studies examining paralinguistic nonverbal communication cues in the Twitter platform across language boundaries.

PurposeThis study aims to examine the relationship among nonverbal customer-to-customer interactions (CCIs), positive and negative emotions, customer satisfaction and loyalty intentions.Design/methodology/approachThe conceptual model that was developed using the stimulus-organism-response theoretical framework was tested using a sample of 583 consumers.FindingsThe results show that kinesics and paralanguage positively affect customers’ positive emotions while proxemics, paralanguage and physical appearance negatively influence their negative emotions. Further, both positive and negative emotions are found to have significant impacts on customer satisfaction and loyalty intentions.Research limitations/implicationsTheoretically, this study not only contributes to the existing servicescape and customer experience literature but also expands nonverbal interaction research in the hospitality management field. However, results may have limited generalizability to other service settings and other cultural contexts.Originality/valueThis study is one of the first to investigate the impact of nonverbal CCIs on service experiences.

This paper aims to explore the role of production and perception constraints in computer mediated communication. I review Lindblom's (1990) theory of phonetic variation and propose a new model of linguistic production in Computer Mediated Communication. Cyber citizens use cyber communication as conceptually oral, medially written. The reason to use chat-mode is that it saves time and space (the principle of least effort); here sound, not spelling, is the first thing to be considered. With respect to production in the proposed model, effort is no longer equated with articulatory movement, but rather with the number of keystrokes involved in typing an utterance. On discussing online, discussants show paralinguistic actions such as smile, frown, screaming, etc., and they also reduplicate writings, capitalize all the sentences, and use emoticons; net-communication is headed toward less grammatical and more telegraphic type. The production of hyper-and hypo-forms such as reduplication, punctuation and capitalization will vary according to the sender's estimation of signal-complementary processes and his attempts to compensate for the restricted context.We discuss online and off line on the issues; why we like cyber communication and how we classify the phenomena. The more computer mediated communications we use, the moreissues we have to review beyond words and linguistic principles.

This paper explores the use of paralinguistics, defined as cues which facilitate interaction and communication without the use of specific words (e.g., emoticons, emojis) in instructor-student technologically-mediated out-of-class communication (TMOCC). Using an experiment manipulating cue use and instructor sex in initial emails, we examined how respondents’ (N = 236) impressions of instructors’ credibility and immediacy are influenced by these paralinguistics. Results suggest instructors who use paralinguistics may be perceived as more immediate and caring but less competent; perceived trustworthiness was unaffected by paralinguistic use. Instructor sex did not generate significant differences in students’ impressions. These findings have implications for current instructors when engaging in TMOCC with students; limitations and future directions are also discussed.

The relevance of the study is to clarify the psycholinguistic potential of the «caps» of «Kino-Gazeta» (1928-1932), which will allow not only to expand the range of knowledge about the specific use of verbal and paralinguistic means of designing «caps» of a particular historical period, which, having an ideological color, outlined the vectors of forming public opinion, but also to reveal the peculiarities of the influence of the aforementioned means of design of «caps» on a specific audience. The purpose of the study was to find out the psycholinguistic potential of the «caps» of «Kino-Gazeta» (1928-1932). To achieve this goal the following methods were used: analysis, synthesis, descriptive, comparative, method of quantitative-qualitative analysis, epistemic-perceptual, method of epistemic intent-analysis, experiment. The research methodology was to select incentive material according to the criterion of having the maximum number of paralinguistic means of designing «caps» in accordance with the specifics inherent in each year of issue of the aforementioned newspaper, and conducting an experiment, during which 29 participants of the experiment, higher education graduates by specialty «Journalists», had to complete seven tasks. The use of the epistemic-perceptual method (working name) allowed the participants of the experiment, who had a general background knowledge of the episteme of the late 20's - early 30’s of the twentieth century, assuming the position of the recipient at the time, to assume the specific influence of «caps» on him. The use of epistemic intent-analysis allowed the participants of the experiment, taking into account the episteme of a specific period (late 20’s – early 30’s of the twentieth century), to make assumptions about the intents of using different font sizes, decorative elements, non-standard recording of words in the «caps» of «Kino-gazeta» of the aforementioned period. Conclusion. Thus, the large volume of caps, their saturation with paralinguistic means of complication, complicating perception, do not motivate the participants of the experiment to thoroughly familiarize themselves with the contents of «caps». As a result of the experiment, it was found out that the psycholinguistic potential of the «Kino-gazeta» «hats» (1928–1932) arises from the interaction of verbal and paralinguistic means of hat design, which, by creating new meanings, give rise to different variants of perception and interpretation.

Research has examined persuasive language, but relatively little is known about how persuasive people are when they attempt to persuade through paralanguage, or acoustic properties of speech (e.g., pitch and volume). People often detect and react against what communicators say, but might they be persuaded by speakers' attempts to modulate how they say it? Four experiments support this possibility, demonstrating that communicators engaging in paralinguistic persuasion attempts (i.e., modulating their voice to persuade) naturally use paralinguistic cues that influence perceivers' attitudes and choice. Rather than being effective because they go undetected, however, the results suggest a subtler possibility. Even when they are detected, paralinguistic attempts succeed because they make communicators seem more confident without undermining their perceived sincerity. Consequently, speakers' confident vocal demeanor persuades others by serving as a signal that they more strongly endorse the stance they take in their message. Further, we find that paralinguistic approaches to persuasion can be uniquely effective even when linguistic ones are not. A cross-study exploratory analysis and replication experiment reveal that communicators tend to speak louder and vary their volume during paralinguistic persuasion attempts, both of which signal confidence and, in turn, facilitate persuasion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The paper describes the “Meeting” situation model using componential analysis. The aim of the present study is to reveal and systematize functional-pragmatic and cognitive features of this professionally regulated genre. The results of the analysis may be summarized as follows: the speech interaction dominant has been revealed; the main speech strategies were defined within studied communicative event for every participant on the basis of their pragmatic goals; these strategies realize their status as a discourse person. The research considers the interrelation between participants’ speech strategies and semantic steps referring to their gender. We present a multilevel model of the situation, its structure and specific features of each level. The components of the cognitive level are constituted by the cultural background, shared by every participant. The distinctive feature of the paralinguistic level is the hierarchy of its components: participants’ pragmatic goals, the hierarchy of their speech strategies based on the criteria “shared/unique”, “dominant/peripheral” and their “contribution” into representing participants’ position status. On the lingua-pragmatic level, speech acts expressing communicative intentions have been summoned as an opposition on the basis of the “expressed modality” criterion, which also reflects some gender peculiarities. On the semantic level, there is no unequivocal correlation of the semantic steps, speech acts and the priority of semantic steps in realizing speech strategies.

This article explores the translation of poetic rhythm: not the rhythm of the source text, but the rhythm of the translational act itself. This re-conception of translation’s rhythmic task is enabled by a translation designed for the polyglot, rather than for the monoglot, reader. In this new understanding of translational process, rhythm not only embodies the perceptual and cognitive experience of the translating subject, it also makes more intimate the relationship between language and voice, the linguistic and the paralinguistic. Furthermore, it has as much to do with the space of translation, its distribution on the page, as with its changing temporal modes. The translator, then, does not translate the rhythm of a text so much as a text’s capacity for rhythm, and that capacity includes both espousing the perspective of a translating ‘I’ and releasing what is not linguistically manifest in the source text. These propositions are tested in two translations of Leconte de Lisle’s ‘Midi’.

Purpose The study of deception and the theories, which have been developed have relied heavily on laboratory experiments in controlled environments, using American college students participating in mock scenarios. The purpose of this paper is to validate previous deception detection research in a real-world, high stakes environment where the unit of analysis is the question–response pair. Design/methodology/approach The study used previously confirmed linguistic and paralinguistic speech cues and the constructs of deception in an attempt to validate a leading deception theory, interpersonal deception theory (IDT). A combination of descriptive and predictive analysis was conducted to best understand the relationship between speech cues and changes in the subjects’ behavior. Findings The result validates IDT with mixed results on individual measures and their constructs. However, there is clear evidence across the 711 question-response pairs that not only was it possible to differentiate truth from deceptive behavior but also patterns of behavior can be seen over time. Research limitations/implications Because of the real-world nature of the study, it is difficult to generalize the results to a larger population. However, one implication for future research is the development of methods to capture, process and prepare raw speech into data ready for analysis. Originality/value This paper attempts to fill the gap between the controlled mock scenarios and the harsh reality of real-world deception.

Classroom-based communication requires an appropriate contribution from lecturer’s perspectives to address students’ non-cognitive skills. This study examines the paralinguistic attribution contributions deriving from lecturer’s visual manner. Of 504 pre-service English teachers, 120 freshmen participated in this study. Data collection used the questionnaire through a random sampling selection from lecturer’s writing instruction. Data analysis used the multiple regression analyses with the significance level (p-value) of .05. The findings exhibited that lecturer’s paralinguistic attributions, namely: articulation (t = 1.073; p = .286), sonority (t = 2.896; p = .005), loudness (t = 3.433; p = .001), facial expression and lips setting (t = 1.097; p = .275), and gesture (t = 2.323; p = .022) contributed a significant influence towards the writing class instruction positively. The effectiveness of the paralinguistic attributions contributed 45.5% from overall findings shown in this study, in which the regression analysis statistically addressed that F = 19.017, R² = .455, and p .05. This study concludes the existence of the paralinguistic attributions accommodates freshmen’s learning maturation in lecturer’s instructional modes.

The processing of speech as an explicit sequence of events is common in automatic speech recognition (linguistic events), but has received relatively little attention in paralinguistic speech classification despite its potential for characterizing broad acoustic event sequences. This paper proposes a framework for analyzing speech as a sequence of acoustic events, and investigates its application to depression detection. In this framework, acoustic space regions are tokenized to ‘words’ representing speech events at fixed or irregular intervals. This tokenization allows the exploitation of acoustic word features using proven natural language processing methods. A key advantage of this framework is its ability to accommodate heterogeneous event types: herein we combine acoustic words and speech landmarks, which are articulation-related speech events. Another advantage is the option to fuse such heterogeneous events at various levels, including the embedding level. Evaluation of the proposed framework on both controlled laboratory-grade supervised audio recordings as well as unsupervised self-administered smartphone recordings highlight the merits of the proposed framework across both datasets, with the proposed landmark-dependent acoustic words achieving improvements in F1(depressed) of up to 15% and 13% for SH2-FS and DAIC-WOZ respectively, relative to acoustic speech baseline approaches.

Given the limited accessibility to Speech and Language Pathologists (SLPs) children in need often have, pediatric Computer-Aided Speech Therapy (CAST) tools can play an important role in the early diagnosis and treatment of speech disorders. However, various challenges impede the implementation of accurate automated analysis of speech disorders in children. In this article, we first discuss three key challenges in processing child disordered speech: 1) the unreliability of low-level annotation and scarcity of speech corpora, 2) speaker diarization of therapy sessions and 3) inaccurate children's acoustic models. We next explore opportunities to overcome some of these challenges. First, we investigate the effectiveness of high-level paralinguistic features in disordered speech detection to reduce the dependency on annotated data. A binary classifier trained using paralinguistic features extracted from both typically developing children and those suffering from Speech Sound Disorders (SSD) achieved 87% subject-level classification accuracy. Second, we tackle the speech disorder detection problem as an anomaly detection problem where models are trained merely on typically developing speech, reducing the need for disordered training data. A phoneme-level F 1 score of 0.77 was obtained from an anomaly detection-based system trained on speech attribute features to classify between typical and atypical phoneme pronunciations of children with speech disorder. Finally, we test the efficiency of an x-vector based speaker diarization technique in pediatric therapy sessions. The method successfully distinguished between therapist and child speech with a Diarization Error Rate (DER) of 10%.

This study is concerned with the Iraqi autistic patients’ conceptualization of adverbs of time and place at the levels of production and recognition. To measure the mental ability of a particular category of autistic patients in terms of adverb use, a group of seven to ten years of age, in the school of Hama’im Al-Salam for Language Impaired Children have been variously tested; using spontaneous oral tests by their own teachers. A number of twenty-five patient-students are selected to be representative enough. After collecting the data and conducting a qualitative and quantitive analysis, the study has come up with certain conclusions. Chief among them is that Iraqi autistic patients fail, most of the time, to recognize time adverb more than place adverbs using the silence as a strategy to show their failure in recognition and production of adverbs. Furthermore, certain paralinguistic cures are employed as the rolling of the eyes, nodding the head and smiling.

Repair is the effort that speaker makes to smooth utterances or conversations in order to achieve the ongoing progressivity of the turn. Among the types of repair, self-repair is mostly preferred (Schegloff et al., 1977) in talk-in-interaction, and in self-repair, self-initiated self-repair is mostly preferred, especially when it happens in the same turn. Therefore it has received much attention. In the gate-keeping interviews for Chinese candidates to get access to the target college in Britain, there occurs in L2 a large number of same-turn self-initiated self-repair cases, in which the initiation is no longer the single lexical words, or the non-lexical pauses like cut-off, or sound stretches as has been studied, but the paralinguistic device, laughter. Despite the numerous studies on roles of laughter, there is hardly a mention of laughter employed as a self-repair initiation. Consequently, this study determines on the focus on laughter as a self-repair initiator in L2, and aims to identify its exact shape and positions in self-repair and relevant repairing segment, therefore concluding on its specific functions and its relations with delicacy. This study wishes to contribute to the researches on self-repair initiation in Conversation Analysis and on laughter in particular L2 testing context.

In this paper, we describe the process that we used to create a new corpus of children’s emotional speech. We used a Wizard of Oz (WoZ) setting to induce different emotional reactions in children during speech-based interactions with two robots. We recorded the speech spoken in Mexican Spanish by 174 children (both sexes) between 6 and 11 years of age. The recordings were manually segmented and transcribed. The segments were then labeled with two types of emotional-related paralinguistic information: emotion and attitude. The corpus contained 2093 min of audio recordings (34.88 h) divided into 19,793 speech segments. The Interactive Emotional Children’s Speech Corpus (IESC-Child) can be a valuable resource for researchers studying affective reactions in speech communication during child-computer interactions in Spanish and for creating models to recognize acoustic paralinguistic information. IESC-Child is available to the research community upon request.

El empleo de la comunicación no verbal es intrínseco a la comunicación humana y, por tanto, necesario para transmitir un mensaje de forma adecuada. En este trabajo nos centramos en una categoría fundamental del paralenguaje: los elementos cuasiléxicos. El Trabajo de Fin de Máster que aquí presentamos tiene como objetivo exponer un estado de la cuestión sobre el tratamiento de estos signos paralingüísticos desde distintas disciplinas y perspectivas, prestando especial atención a las investigaciones relacionadas con la enseñanza del español como lengua extranjera. Para ello, accedemos a los documentos que regulan la enseñanza de ELE y determinamos si los postulados de estos documentos se llevan al aula de ELE. Este estado de la cuestión permitirá obtener una idea del punto en el que se encuentra el estudio y la aplicación de los signos no verbales cuasiléxicos en el marco de la enseñanza de español como lengua extranjera y abrirá posibles caminos para futuros investigadores., The use of non-verbal communication is intrinsic to human communication and, therefore, necessary to convey a message adequately. In this paper, we focus on a fundamental part of paralanguage: quasilexical elements. The Master's Thesis aims to present a state of the art on the treatment of these paralinguistic signs from different disciplines, paying special attention to research related to the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language. To this end, we will access the documents that regulates the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language and determine whether the postulates of these documents are taken to the Spanish as a foreign language classroom. This state of the art will allow us to obtain an idea of the current state of the study of nonverbal communication in the framework of teaching Spanish as a foreign language and what possible investigations are open to future researchers., Máster Universitario en Formación de profesores de Español como Lengua Extranjera (M200)

En el presente Trabajo de Fin de Máster se hace una revisión del tratamiento de la comunicación no verbal, en concreto de los signos paralingüísticos y quinésicos, en los manuales de ELE mediante la revisión detallada de dos manuales específicos para la enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras: Nuevo Prisma (editorial Edinumen, 2012-2018) y Método (editorial Anaya, 2012-2021). Para llevar a cabo el análisis se tienen en cuenta las investigaciones relacionadas con el objeto de estudio y nociones básicas sobre comunicación no verbal, así como los dos documentos oficiales en el ámbito de la L2/LE: El Marco común europeo de referencia para las lenguas: aprendizaje, enseñanza, evaluación (Consejo de Europa, 2002) y su volumen complementario (Consejo de Europa, 2021) y el Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes. Niveles de referencia para el español (Instituto Cervantes, 2006) en cuanto al tratamiento que presentan sobre los signos no verbales. Una vez comprobadas y estudiadas estas cuestiones teóricas, se presentan los procedimientos analíticos que han permitido desarrollar el estado de la cuestión. Se han creado plantillas elaboradas de forma específica para el análisis de manuales, que recogen las variables necesarias para obtener la información pertinente y establecer el estado de la cuestión que se ofrece en este trabajo: tratamiento del paralenguaje y la quinésica en los manuales de ELE actuales. Por último, se presentan las futuras vías de investigación que pueden llevarse a cabo tomando en consideración los resultados de este estudio. This paper reviews the treatment of non-verbal communication, specifically paralinguistic and kinesic signs, in SFL textbooks by means of a detailed review of two specific textbooks for foreign language teaching: Nuevo Prisma (editorial Edinumen, 2012-2018) and Método (editorial Anaya, 2012-2021). The analysis takes into account research related to the object of study and basic notions of non-verbal communication, as well as the two official documents in the field of L2/FL: The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (Council of Europe, 2002) and its complementary volume (Council of Europe, 2021) and the Curricular Plan of the Cervantes Institute. Spanish reference levels (Instituto Cervantes, 2006) in terms of their treatment of non-verbal signs. Once these theoretical issues have been verified and studied, the analytical procedures which have allowed the state of the art to be developed are presented. The templates have been created specifically for the analysis of textbooks, including the variables necessary to obtain the relevant information and to establish the state of the art offered in this work: the treatment of paralanguage and kinesics in current SFL textbooks. Finally, taking into consideration the results of this study, future further research to be conducted is presented. Máster Universitario en Formación de Profesores de Español (M057). Especialidad en Enseñanza de Español como Lengua Extranjera

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) makes it possible for machines to perceive affective information. Our previous research differed from conventional SER endeavours in that it focused on recognising unseen emotions in speech autonomously through machine learning. Such a step would enable the automatic leaning of unknown emerging emotional states. This type of learning framework, however, still relied on manual annotations to obtain multiple samples of each emotion. In order to reduce this additional workload, herein, we propose a zero-shot SER framework employing a per-emotion semantic-embedding paradigm to describe emotions in zero-shot SER, instead of using the sample-wise descriptors. Aiming to optimise the relationship between emotions, prototypes, and speech samples, this framework includes two types of learning strategies: Sample-wise learning and emotion-wise learning. These strategies apply a novel learning process to speech samples and emotions, respectively, via specifically designed semantic-embedding prototypes. We verify the utility of these approaches by performing an extensive experimental evaluation on two corpora on three aspects, namely the influence of different types of learning strategies, emotional-pair comparison, and the selections of semantic-embedding prototypes and paralinguistic features. The experimental results indicate that it is applicable to use semantic-embedding prototypes for zero-shot emotion recognition in speech, despite the influence of choosing optimal strategies and prototypes.

The main objective of the research is to analyze the communication skills of Pedro Sánchez as spanish government spokesperson and assess whether they have contributed to effective crisis communication through his television speeches, in the specific context of the first State of Alarm caused by COVID -19. Content analysis is applied as a method, through the quantitative systematization of the kinesic language and the qualitative interpretation of nonverbal communication, taking as a sample the entire corpus of analysis, which includes all the presidential interventions in the indicated period. The president reveals great control of body tension and basic primary vocal qualities, and an excessive redundancy of identical bodily patterns. The political leader demonstrate gestural differences between the rising and falling phase of the virus contagion curve, although in both stages there is a frequent lack of intersystemic communicative coherence. It is concluded that the asynchronous behavior between verbal, paralinguistic and kinesic communication and gestural repetition influences the credibility of the speech and the persuasive power. El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar las competencias comunicativas desplegadas por el presidente del Gobierno de España y valorar en qué medida han contribuido a una comunicación de crisis eficaz a través de sus discursos televisivos, en el contexto concreto del primer Estado de Alarma provocado por la COVID-19. Se aplica un análisis de contenido, mediante la sistematización cuantitativa del lenguaje kinésico y la interpretación cualitativa del sistema de significación no verbal en su conjunto, tomando como muestra de análisis el total de las intervenciones presidenciales en el período señalado. Los resultados determinan que el presidente mantiene un gran control sobre la tensión corporal y las cualidades vocales primarias básicas y redunda en pautas gestuales idénticas. Se muestran diferencias expresivas entre la fase de ascenso y de descenso de la curva de contagios del virus, aunque en ambas etapas (escalada y desescalada) se aprecia falta de coherencia comunicativa intersistémica. Se concluye que la asincronía entre su comunicación verbal, paralingüística y kinésica y la reiteración gestual afectan a la verosimilitud del discurso y al poder persuasivo del mismo

The aim of the study was to validate an instrument and propose standards to measure the language skills of school adolescents. 2270 adolescents (1134 males and 1136 females) in the region of Maule (Chile) was studied. The age range is between 10 to 18 years. The validated instrument has three categories (verbal, paralinguistic and non-verbal) and a total of 26 items. The instrument showed to be valid after the confirmatory analysis and Cronbach α (0.86 to 0.88) showed highly reliable values. The LMS method to develop percentiles, let p10, p50 and p90 calculated by age and sex. The instrument measures developed language skills valid and reliable also adopted cutoffs allow diagnose and adolescents by age and sex. These results suggest the use and application of the instrument as an everyday tool in social, cultural and educational contexts.

This study examines the pragmatic functions of the marker sawa in spoken Swahili. The data have been obtained from informal conversations made by Swahili speakers in informal social settings. These settings include “vijiwe vya kahawa” (setting of informal conversations created around people drinking coffee) and "vijiwe vya mamantilie” (setting of informal conversations created around women preparing and selling food on the streets). The analysis of the data, performed within the framework of the contextualization theory (Gumperz 1982), shows that, apart from its basic connotation of agreement, the marker sawa conveys other meanings, depending on these very contexts of communication, and therefore acquires also various pragmatic functions. The pragmatic functions identified in this work include: to show that the speaker agrees with what has been said but on a condition (I agree, but…), as a receipt marker, as a tag-positioned-comprehension check, as an answer to the question showing that the speaker has understood what has been said (Yes, I understand), as a continuer, as a negative releasing marker, and as a gap filler. Interestingly, the study shows also that intonation and other paralinguistic features (like gestures) play a role in determining the pragmatic functions of this marker. The article concludes that the pragmatic markers in spoken Swahili are rich in meanings and are used to show speakers’ attitudes and emotions, therefore manifesting a deep and meaningful interconnection between the language and its contextualized experience. DOI: https://doi.org/10.32690/SALC53.2

The recent proliferation of social Web applications has facilitated an array of new customer engagement behaviors. Creating social presence in brand communication is key to creating positive outcom...

In a stand up comedy, the Stand-up comedian or also known as comic have to tell about their restlessness to the audience in a funny way. In order to make the audience laugh, they surely need to make the audience understand the topic being discussed. Concerning to the success of a communication, Paul Grice (19890 proposed four cooperative principles that people expected to follow; maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of relevance, and maxim of manner (Yule, 1996). However, Attardo claims that disobeying maxims is common in a research of humor (Attardo, 1990). Thus, this study is purposed to compare the flout of maxims done by an Indonesian comic and an American comic, its joke techniques which they employ while flouting maxims to create humorous materials and the reason why they flout certain maxim the most and use certain joke techniques. This study uses descriptive qualitative method to observe the result of flouting maxims in Stand up comedy. The result finding of this study will be in a form of descriptive text. The participants of this study are an Indonesian comic named Abdur Arsyad and an American comic named Kevin Hart. The result of this study finds that the maxims each comics flout the most are different which is influenced by the difference of their nationalities and cultures. Kevin flouts maxim of quantity the most because of the influence of American culture which tend to be direct in communication. Meanwhile, Abdur flouts maxim of quality the most because of the influence of Indonesian culture which tend to be indirect in communication. Even though the maxim they flout the most are different, their flout of maxims are similarly employed all types of joke techniques which contributed to create humor. Their flouts of maxims have employed paralanguage, ridicule, satire, and politeness strategy of joke techniques. The similarity of the joke techniques employed by both comics is influenced by their ethnic background. Abdur Arsyad and Kevin Hart have different nationalities, however they have the same ethnic background. Abdur comes from East side of Indonesia, and Kevin is African-American which both are minority in their countries. Therefore, they employ the same joke telling technique to deliver the jokes. It can also be influenced by their joke materials which are similar. Both of them usually bring up the topic of the restlessness of being minority and about social criticism.

This paper examined the proficiency of Holy Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) in nonverbal communication and particularly its sub-fields like Kinesics, Haptics, and Proxemics during conversation in the light of the Hadiths. The Holy Quran attests it and every Muslim believes it that Muhammad (pbuh) was sent by Allah to serve as a role-model in the sphere of refined and excellent manners. We look up to his conversation manners too and his model of conversation, for holding successful conversation. Communication experts and linguists have come up with new perspectives over the dynamics of conversation, according to which people normally assume that the transmission of meaning to the listener and the creation of impression on the mind of the listener is dependent mostly upon words. But in reality words, instead of working in isolation, work in unison with the nonverbal language. In fact, the share of nonverbal language in conveying meaning is more than the verbal language during an interaction. The Holy Prophet kept his volume and tone low and polite; his eye contact was never irritating; his facial expressions were inviting; his smiles and jolliness were befriending; his body contact was soothing, his manner of speaking made his words understandable and memorable; his use of hands was enlightening; his silence was for lenience, the roughness of his conversation opponent led to increase in his politeness, his address to different participants of the gathering was based on consideration and fairness.

Role models can exert considerable influence in shaping individuals’ values, attitudes, and beliefs. A large body of work in the social sciences has investigated the influence of celebrity role models, and in the context of education, several disciplines have a rich research history in this area (e.g. medical education). However, in the context of second language acquisition, research centred on role models has largely remained on the periphery. This study presents a large-scale international survey investigating the role models of English language learners. With data collected from 8,472 participants, analysis investigated whether these learners had English language role models, who the role models were and what characteristics learners valued in them, and investigated systematic variation among subgroups. Results showed that 68 per cent of respondents reported having an English language role model, and four key role model dimensions emerged: overall command of English, paralinguistic features, personal attributes and accent/variety of English. We argue that role modelling may be a highly influential component of the psychological context of second-language acquisition, and conclude by highlighting several valuable areas for future research.

This article unpacks the basic mechanisms by which paralinguistic features communicated through the voice can affect evaluative judgments and persuasion. Special emphasis is placed on exploring the rapidly emerging literature on vocal features linked to appraisals of confidence (e.g., vocal pitch, intonation, speech rate, loudness, etc.), and their subsequent impact on information processing and meta-cognitive processes of attitude change. The main goal of this review is to advance understanding of the different psychological processes by which paralinguistic markers of confidence can affect attitude change, specifying the conditions under which they are more likely to operate. In sum, we highlight the importance of considering basic mechanisms of attitude change to predict when and why appraisals of paralinguistic markers of confidence can lead to more or less persuasion, Funding was provided by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Grant Numbers: 410-2010-1374, 435-2015-0114).

Cochlear implanted (CI) adults with acquired deafness are known to depend on multisensory integration skills (MSI) for speech comprehension through the fusion of speech reading skills and their deficient auditory perception. But, little is known on how CI patients perceive prosodic information relating to speech content. Our study aimed to identify how CI patients use MSI between visual and auditory information to process paralinguistic prosodic information of multimodal speech and the visual strategies employed. A psychophysics assessment was developed, in which CI patients and hearing controls (NH) had to distinguish between a question and a statement. The controls were separated into two age groups (young and aged-matched) to dissociate any effect of aging. In addition, the oculomotor strategies used when facing a speaker in this prosodic decision task were recorded using an eye-tracking device and compared to controls. This study confirmed that prosodic processing is multisensory but it revealed that CI patients showed significant supra-normal audiovisual integration for prosodic information compared to hearing controls irrespective of age. This study clearly showed that CI patients had a visuo-auditory gain more than 3 times larger than that observed in hearing controls. Furthermore, CI participants performed better in the visuo-auditory situation through a specific oculomotor exploration of the face as they significantly fixate the mouth region more than young NH participants who fixate the eyes, whereas the aged-matched controls presented an intermediate exploration pattern equally reported between the eyes and mouth. To conclude, our study demonstrated that CI patients have supra-normal skills MSI when integrating visual and auditory linguistic prosodic information, and a specific adaptive strategy developed as it participates directly in speech content comprehension.

Effective interpersonal communication is important to maintain relationships and build trust, empathy, and confidence. In this digital age, communication has become mediated, which filters out many of the social cues that are essential to facilitate interpersonal communication. This paper investigates the extent to which social cues influence social presence in mediated, bidirectional, multiparty interaction. Literature related to six social cues – paralinguistic cues, linguistic cues, body language, eye movements, facial expressions, and proxemic cues – was reviewed. These cues were ranked based on how relevant they are in creating a sense of social presence in mediated social communication (MSC). The most relevant cue was eye movements, followed by facial expression and linguistic cues, and lastly, body language and proxemic cues. Paralinguistic cues could not be ranked due to sparse literature in the context of MSC. Further research is required to better understand how social cues can be incorporated into MSC systems.

The human speech contains paralinguistic information used in many speech recognition applications like automatic speech recognition, speaker recognition, and verification. Gender from voice is considered as one of the essential tasks to be detected for such applications. To build a model from a training set, a set of relevant speech features is extracted in order to distinguish gender (i.e., female or male) from a speech signal. This paper focuses on comparison of the proposed neural network (NN) model with the different features like MFCC and mel spectrogram extracted from the speech signal to recognize the gender. Experiments are carried on Mozilla voice dataset and evaluated performance of the network. Experiments show that the combination of MFCC and mel feature sets shows the better accuracy with 94.32%.

F0 variation is a crucial feature in speech prosody, which can convey linguistic information such as focus and paralinguistic meanings such as surprise. How can multiple layers of information be represented with F0 in speech: are they divided into discrete layers of pitch or overlapped without clear divisions? We investigated this question by assessing pitch perception of focus and surprise in Mandarin Chinese. Seventeen native Mandarin listeners rated the strength of focus and surprise conveyed by the same set of synthetically manipulated sentences. An fMRI experiment was conducted to assess neural correlates of the listeners' perceptual response to the stimuli. The results showed that behaviourally, the perceptual threshold for focus was 3 semitones and that for surprise was 5 semitones above the baseline. Moreover, the pitch range of 5-12 semitones above the baseline signalled both focus and surprise, suggesting a considerable overlap between the two types of prosodic information within this range. The neuroimaging data positively correlated with the variations in behavioural data. Also, a ceiling effect was found as no significant behavioural differences or neural activities were shown after reaching a certain pitch level for the perception of focus and surprise respectively. Together, the results suggest that different layers of prosodic information are represented in F0 through different pitch ranges: paralinguistic information is represented at a pitch range beyond that used by linguistic information. Meanwhile, the representation of paralinguistic information is achieved without obscuring linguistic prosody, thus allowing F0 to represent the two layers of information in parallel.

Background and Objectives Elderspeak is an inappropriate simplified speech register that sounds like baby talk and is used with older adults, especially in health care settings. Understanding the concept of elderspeak is challenging due to varying views about which communicative components constitute elderspeak and whether elderspeak is beneficial or harmful for older adults. Research Design and Methods Rodgers’ evolutionary concept analysis method was used to evaluate the concept of elderspeak through identification of elderspeak’s attributes, antecedents, and consequences. A systematic search using the PubMed, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and Embase databases was completed. Results Eighty-three theoretical or research articles from 1981 to 2020 were identified. Elderspeak characteristics were categorized by semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, paralinguistic, and nonverbal attributes. The primary antecedent to elderspeak is implicit ageism, in which old age cues and signs of functional or cognitive impairment led to simplified communication, usually from a younger caregiver. Research studies varied in reporting whether elderspeak facilitated or interfered with comprehension by older adults, in part depending on the operational definition of elderspeak and experimental manipulations. Exaggerated prosody, a key feature of elderspeak, was found to reduce comprehension. Elderspeak was generally perceived as patronizing by older adults and speakers were perceived as less respectful. In persons with dementia, elderspeak also increases the probability of resistiveness to care, which is an important correlate of behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia. Discussion and Implications Based on this concept analysis, a new definition of elderspeak is proposed, in which attributes that have been found to enhance comprehension are differentiated from those that do not. Recommendations for consistent operationalization of elderspeak in future research are made.

It was a descriptive research which studied the use of non-verbal communication in the pedagogic practices at secondary school level in Lahore. The study was conducted to examine the practices of teachers’ non-verbal communication used in conjunction with verbal communication in actual classroom setting by teachers which affected the participation and performance level of learners. It investigated the students’ understanding, interpretation of and attitude towards non-verbal communication used by teachers and identified the existing barriers for the use of non-verbal communication strategies to improve students’ learning. The non-verbal communication was restricted to five factors—physical appearance, facial expressions, eye contact, spatial distance and paralinguistic. The study was limited to the subject of English (compulsory) at the female secondary schools in public sector. The sample comprised of 1200 students and 40 teachers from female public high schools of Lahore (Punjab), Pakistan. The study recommended that all female teachers at secondary level schools should be provided an orientation in non-verbal communication which would help them to use these skills in their teaching methodologies. While recognizing the importance of non-verbal communication, the curriculum planners and policy makers should take practical steps to make it a part of teacher education programs for the training of prospective teachers. Moreover, an awareness among students shall be created on how to interpret and reflect upon the teachers’ non-verbal communication signals during teaching-learning process. Keywords: Non-verbal, physical appearance, eye contact, paralanguage, body movements, facial expressions, gestures, high school, interaction

This chapter explores the nature of our communication, the skills associated with quality communication, and the contextual factors within sport which influence the development of strong working relationships, which are only achieved through clear communication strategies. The linguistic aspect of communication delineates both what is spoken or written, but also how it is spoken or written, through paralanguage and grammatical intonation respectively. The non-verbal aspects of communication, often referred to as cues, encapsulate a wide range of elements such as gestures, touch and body positioning, physical appearance and posture, and facial expressions. Posture and physical appearance can also contribute significantly to the impression formed by others. The ability to understand how others identify with and interpret the world assists people in understanding their actions; therefore, the skilled development of what some researchers term ‘interpersonal constructs’ is critical to facilitating learning within any coaching environment.

Automatic detection of speech affecting (SA) diseases has received significant attention, particularly in clinical scenarios. However, the same task in in-the-wild conditions is often neglected, in part, due to the lack of appropriate datasets.In this work, we present the in-the-Wild Speech Medical (WSM) Corpus, a collection of in-the-wild videos, featuring subjects potentially affected by a SA disease - specifically, depression or Parkinson’s disease. The WSM Corpus contains a total 928 videos, and over 131 hours of speech. Each video is accompanied by a crowdsourced annotation for perceived age/gender, and self-reported health status of the speaker. The WSM Corpus is balanced over all the labels.In this work we present a detailed description of the collection, and annotation processes of the WSM corpus. Furthermore, we present present several baseline systems for the detection of SA diseases using speech alone, thus motivating the use of this type of in-the-wild data in paralinguistic audiovisual tasks.

Bipolar disorder (BD) and borderline personality disorder (BPD) are two chronic mental health conditions that clinicians find challenging to distinguish based on clinical interviews, due to their overlapping symptoms. In this work, we investigate the automatic detection of these two conditions by modelling both verbal and non-verbal cues in a set of interviews. We propose a new approach of modelling short-term features with visibility-signature transform, and compare it with widely used high-level statistical functions. We demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed signature-based model. Furthermore, we show the role of different sets of features in characterising BD and BPD.