The Emergence of the Speech Capacity


Book Description

Oller constructs a new infrastructural model of vocal communication systems that permits provocative reconceptualizations of the ways infant vocalizations progress systematically toward speech, insightful comparaisons between..




Turn-taking in human communicative interaction


Book Description

The core use of language is in face-to-face conversation. This is characterized by rapid turn-taking. This turn-taking poses a number central puzzles for the psychology of language. Consider, for example, that in large corpora the gap between turns is on the order of 100 to 300 ms, but the latencies involved in language production require minimally between 600 ms (for a single word) or 1500 ms (for as simple sentence). This implies that participants in conversation are predicting the ends of the incoming turn and preparing in advance. But how is this done? What aspects of this prediction are done when? What happens when the prediction is wrong? What stops participants coming in too early? If the system is running on prediction, why is there consistently a mode of 100 to 300 ms in response time? The timing puzzle raises further puzzles: it seems that comprehension must run parallel with the preparation for production, but it has been presumed that there are strict cognitive limitations on more than one central process running at a time. How is this bottleneck overcome? Far from being 'easy' as some psychologists have suggested, conversation may be one of the most demanding cognitive tasks in our everyday lives. Further questions naturally arise: how do children learn to master this demanding task, and what is the developmental trajectory in this domain? Research shows that aspects of turn-taking, such as its timing, are remarkably stable across languages and cultures, but the word order of languages varies enormously. How then does prediction of the incoming turn work when the verb (often the informational nugget in a clause) is at the end? Conversely, how can production work fast enough in languages that have the verb at the beginning, thereby requiring early planning of the whole clause? What happens when one changes modality, as in sign languages – with the loss of channel constraints is turn-taking much freer? And what about face-to-face communication amongst hearing individuals – do gestures, gaze, and other body behaviors facilitate turn-taking? One can also ask the phylogenetic question: how did such a system evolve? There seem to be parallels (analogies) in duetting bird species, and in a variety of monkey species, but there is little evidence of anything like this among the great apes. All this constitutes a neglected set of problems at the heart of the psychology of language and of the language sciences. This Research Topic contributes to advancing our understanding of these problems by summarizing recent work from psycholinguists, developmental psychologists, students of dialog and conversation analysis, linguists, phoneticians, and comparative ethologists.







Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8


Book Description

Children are already learning at birth, and they develop and learn at a rapid pace in their early years. This provides a critical foundation for lifelong progress, and the adults who provide for the care and the education of young children bear a great responsibility for their health, development, and learning. Despite the fact that they share the same objective - to nurture young children and secure their future success - the various practitioners who contribute to the care and the education of children from birth through age 8 are not acknowledged as a workforce unified by the common knowledge and competencies needed to do their jobs well. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 explores the science of child development, particularly looking at implications for the professionals who work with children. This report examines the current capacities and practices of the workforce, the settings in which they work, the policies and infrastructure that set qualifications and provide professional learning, and the government agencies and other funders who support and oversee these systems. This book then makes recommendations to improve the quality of professional practice and the practice environment for care and education professionals. These detailed recommendations create a blueprint for action that builds on a unifying foundation of child development and early learning, shared knowledge and competencies for care and education professionals, and principles for effective professional learning. Young children thrive and learn best when they have secure, positive relationships with adults who are knowledgeable about how to support their development and learning and are responsive to their individual progress. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 offers guidance on system changes to improve the quality of professional practice, specific actions to improve professional learning systems and workforce development, and research to continue to build the knowledge base in ways that will directly advance and inform future actions. The recommendations of this book provide an opportunity to improve the quality of the care and the education that children receive, and ultimately improve outcomes for children.




Conversation Analysis


Book Description

This collection assembles early, yet previously unpublished research into the practices that organize conversational interaction by many of the central figures in the development and advancement of Conversation Analysis as a discipline. Using the methods of sequential analysis as first developed by Harvey Sacks, the authors produce detailed empirical accounts of talk in interaction that make fundamental contributions to our understanding of turntaking, action formation and sequence organization. One distinguishing feature of this collection is that each of the contributors worked directly with Sacks as a collaborator or was trained by him at the University of California or both. Taken together this collection gives readers a taste of CA inquiry in its early years, while nevertheless presenting research of contemporary significance by internationally known conversation analysts.




Turn-taking in Shakespeare


Book Description

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures, and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. Whenever people talk to one another there are at least two things going on at once. First, and most obviously, there is an exchange of speech. Second, and slightly less obviously, there is a negotiation about how that exchange is organised—about whose turn it is to talk at any given moment. Linguists call this second, organisational level of activity 'turn-taking' and since the late 1970s it has been central to the way in which spoken interaction is understood. In spite of its obvious relevance to the study of drama, however, turn-taking has received little attention from critics and editors of Shakespeare. Turn-taking in Shakespeare offers a fresh perspective on the dramatic text by reversing the priorities of traditional literary analysis. Rather than focussing on what characters say, it focuses on when they speak. Rather than focussing on how they talk, it focuses on how they gain access to the floor. Its central argument is that the turn-taking patterns of Shakespeare's plays are a part of what Emrys Jones has called their 'basic structural shaping'—as fundamental to dialogue as rhythm is to verse. The book investigates what it means for a character to speak in or out of turn, to interrupt or overlap with a previous speaker, to pause before speaking, or to fail to speak at all. It explores how these moments are—and are not—signalled by the Shakespearean text, how best to describe and understand them, and the implications of such questions for contemporary debates about editing, rhetoric, prosody, and early modern performance practices.




The Neurobehavioral and Social-Emotional Development of Infants and Children (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)


Book Description

Internationally recognized as one of the premier researchers on child development, Ed Tronick has held notable teaching positions and conducted vital research for nearly 30 years. Over the course of his esteemed career, he has received funding for hundreds of key studies in the US and abroad on normal and abnormal infant and child development—including his Mutual Regulation Model and Still-Face Paradigm, which revolutionized our understanding of infants’ emotional capacities and coping—all of which led to critical contributions in the field. Much of his work serves as the benchmark for how mental health clinicians think about biopsychosocial states of consciousness, the process of meaning making, and how and why we engage with others in the world. Now, for the first time, Tronick has gathered together his most influential writings in a single, essential volume. Organized into five parts—(I) Neurobehavior, (II) Culture, (III) Infant Social-Emotional Interaction, (IV) Perturbations: Natural and Experimental, and (V) Dyadic Expansion of Consciousness and Meaning Making—this book represents his major ideas and studies regarding infant-adult interactions, developmental processes, and mutual regulation, carefully addressing such questions as: What is a state of consciousness? What are the developing infant’s capacities for neurobehavioral self-organization? How are early infant-adult interactions organized? How can we understand the nature of normal versus abnormal development? How do self and mutual regulation relate to developmental processes? Is meaning making purely a function of the brain, or is it in our bodies as well? As a bonus, the book includes a DVD-ROM, with video clips of Tronick’s Still-Face Paradigm, an invaluable teaching aid. Please note that the ebook version of this title does not include a CD.




An Introduction to Developmental Psychology


Book Description

An Introduction to Developmental Psychology, 3rd Edition is a representative and authoritative 'state of the art' account of human development from conception to adolescence. The text is organised chronologically and also thematically and written by renowned experts in the field, and presents a truly international account of theories, findings and issues. The content is designed with a broad range of readers in mind, and in particular those with little previous exposure to developmental psychology.




Early Interaction and Developmental Psychopathology


Book Description

This first book of a two-volume series describes current research and state of the art clinical practice the shed light on the developmental origins of psychopathology in the first year of life, i.e. approximately up to the emergence of secondary intersubjectivity and/or walking. The second volume explores the interactional underpinnings of psychopathology in toddlerhood, from the time of voluntarily gross motor functioning to the emergence and basic organization of symbolic language at 24-30 months. A comprehensive approach is adopted, focusing on the fundamentally interactive nature of early development and examining interactions both with caregivers and more broadly with the socio-cultural environment. The books describe the processes involved in psychopathological trajectories and provide clinical insight into tailored, culturally sensitive therapeutic care in diverse environments. This volume discusses in detail situations placing the infant at risk and the nature of infant development, including communication, intersubjectivity, functional development, and affective and emotional development. Culturally and socially sensitive approaches to psychopathology are examined, with examples of specific infant- and family-centered therapies. Information on risk of abuse and neglect and infant protection policies is included.




Duetting and Turn-Taking Patterns of Singing Mammals: From Genes to Vocal Plasticity, and Beyond


Book Description

Mammalian vocal duets and turn-taking exchanges — long, coordinated acoustic signals exchanged between two individuals— are primarily found in family-living, pair-bonded mammals with a socially monogamous lifestyle (some rodents, some lemurs, tarsiers, titi monkeys, a Mentawai langur, gibbons and siamangs). Duetting and turn-taking patterns combine visual, chemical, tactile and auditory cues to produce some of the most exuberant displays in the realm of animal communication. How and why such phenotypes evolved independently across main lineages are fundamental questions at the core of the nature-nurture debate. Duetting styles ranging from antiphonal (non-overlapping) to simultaneous (overlapping) emissions have now been documented in various taxa, some of which are quite reminiscent of turn-taking rules in human conversation. Nonetheless, much remains to be learned about this complex motor skill, and at all four levels of analysis, namely (1) developmental processes, (2) causal mechanisms (3) functional properties and (4) evolutionary history. Given the strong link between this form of coordinated singing and pair-bonding, gaining a deeper understanding of this kind of cooperative behavior will likely shed more light on the deep evolutionary roots of human culture, language and music.